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Show 40. CHAPTER II: THE GLACIAL EYE GOING LIGHT For many of the members of my generation, Muir's rebirth in Yosemite a century ago was a model of the kind of life worth living. But we found, strangely, that when we discussed his example with our parents and teachers, they saw his life during that period as an evasion of responsibility. Few of us could appeal to someone like Jeanne Carr. Even Muir felt keenly a pressure to return to society and settle down. He talked about it in his letters and in his journal. After he had left his mechanical inventions and determined to devote the rest of his life to studying the inventions of God, still, in February of 1869, he wrote to Jeanne Carr that a friend had sent him a "large sheetful of terrible blue-steel orthodoxy" calling him from "clouds and flowers to the practical walks |