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Show 35 THE FLIGHT FROM ORTHODOXY The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. - Thoreau, Walden Muir had begun the bold and arduous task of reexamining values he had absorbed during his first thirty years of life. It was not a project he was likely to complete very quickly. Because the world was not divided into neat dualities, it was difficult for him to establish a coherent set of beliefs that would replace those he had learned in civilization. As he rebelled against the doctrines enforced upon him in his youth, he rejected at first almost everything he had learned which might be called cultured or civilized. Sometimes his excitement might have led him toward a more redical position than he realized. But he was following a life of principle, not wise policy, as he walked through the South and came to California. It did not trouble him yet that his values would be a social liability for the rest of his life. He thought that he would begin to solve his philosophical dilemma by simply escaping from civilization, and going solitary into the woods. And he attempted to establish a set of implicit resolutions. As I see them, they include the following. He would: (1) Leave civilization and society, and enter the self-consistent realm of Nature. |