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Show 23. because they were afraid of death. And they were afraid of death because they were superstitious. Just as they believed the story of Eve in the Garden, so that story formed the center of a doctrine which disabled the thinking of the "civilized swarm of christians so called." Thus Muir came to see himself as making journeys, every day as he walked from his camp to town, from the world of the dead to the world of the living. He came to prefer the world of the dead, which he perceived as "one of the Lord's most favored abodes of life and light." In Bonaventure life was at work everywhere, remedying the work of men, corroding iron and marble, leveling the hills of earth over the dead, replanting, and "obliterating all memory of the confusion of man." Meanwhile, Muir's fast drew out toward physical weakness. And so when he thought about death, he was surely thinking about his own. As he meditated and wrote in his journal he began to accept, in fact to insist, on the "beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity." Thus he learned to shuck off what he thought of as a Christian doctrine that death was to be feared. In a civilized world, he realized, . . . the most notable & incredible thing that a wild fanatic can say is, "I fear not to die." Yet without question, he realized that one could only accept the interpenetration of life and death in Nature if one also accepted one's own death. But something else was operating on him. In a letter to his brother Daniel, written two years later, he tried to account for the effect of fasting on his consciousness, |