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Show 22. it be dispensed with, I doubt if civilization would ever see me again. That was a big if. Hunger was a fact of life in the wilderness, as it was in civilization. And a botanist had to eat just as a blacksmith did. What would happen if he didn't eat? That was a lesson which waited for him at Bonaventure. BONAVENTURE Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our Earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly- - Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning" "I gazed awe-stricken as one new-arrived from another world," he said, as he looked at the moss draped live oaks of Bonaventure Graveyard. In the narrative of his stay there, which he rewrote at least three times, Muir revealed the most significant turning point in his journey through the South. At Bonaventure he learned to accept his own death by starvation. After reaching Savannah, he hoped to find letters and money waiting for him. He found no word. And so the journal entry for that day ends with one word, "Alone." He visited Bonaventure the next day, and after his money again failed to arrive, he finally decided to camp there, because he was afraid of the loitering Negroes who were so noticeable around town. He assumed that they would be too superstitious to visit the graveyard after dark. And so, for that matter, would he be unlikely to happen upon any whites. Men were afraid of graveyards |