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Show 17 in all things & I too like a weed of civilization feel a constant tendency to return to primitive wildness. Well perhaps I may become a proper plant and repent of my outlawry to society, but if so I must, like a revived methodist learn to love what I hate & to hate what I most intensely & devoutly love. It is hard not to believe that Jeanne Carr helped him to realize this truth about himself. Even as he had left Indianapolis a month before this self discovery, following his immoderate desires toward the "wildest, leafiest, least trodden way," he had asked Jeanne Carr, "Is not your experience the same as this?" He was not entirely alone, for he had brought with him the aspirations of at least one true friend. If he had fallen away from society, and his social duties, she had provided the apple, or even taught him to eat it. Knowledge for its own sake, or for his own sake, heart ravishing knowledge, was what he sought in the wilderness. In his journal, he pondered this sin, if sin it was. The copy of Paradise Lost he carried told him about Eve and the Garden, and he recognized the wrong done to Nature and to Eve by Milton's patriarchal thinking. We are taught that this thing called death is an Evemade accident - a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin - the enemy - the "archenemy" of life . . . Like Adam, Muir scrupled not to eat, but did. Unlike Adam, he would not be sorry. The oldest sin, against the God of the Old Testament, against the God which society had invented to enforce its rules: this was the desire for knowledge, the |