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Show 55. unemployed, as far as the world could understand. He saw a need to continue his commerce with Nature, not with man. In return, his neighbors in Yosemite saw him as an unpleasant and perhaps troublesome vagabond, certainly a capable young man, but unwilling to work. So perhaps we still see him, though with increasing sympathy. He cultivated this image in his early narratives, letters, and journals, and suggested that he had attained a perfect idleness, and a careless life. "I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." But he was not so careless, and his rambling, wandering style of life was, beneath the surface, strenuous, exacting, and disciplined. Only he had departed from mechanical science and abstract philosophical musings. If he was going to avoid the errors of the others who tried to grab the seamless whole of Nature by one handle, he was also going to keep an open mind, and an open life. Although it may not have been very surprising to Muir, to a modern reader it might seem strange that a budding botanist suddenly began to interest himself intensely in geology. The growth of interest was so gradual, that he might scarcely have been aware of the way it inhabited his brain. On the other hand, there is the surprising passage from his journal, written in Little Yosemite at Washburn Lake, on the night of October 1. 1871: |