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Show 58. Yosemite required a sensibility which could only be cultivated in Yosemite. Because he was so small, and the mountain so large, Muir began to discipline his own mind and body. And as he grew wiser in the ways of mountains, he began to extend his explorations out of the Valley. Each excursion became a discipline in itself, and as he received more than he had hoped, he began to reevaluate his education. He wondered about the expectations his education had given him, and he began to reeducate himself in Yosemite. He started with the basic texts. He read Humboldt. He read Lyell's geology, Tyndall's books which presented the physicist's view of the mountains, and probably Agassiz's glacial studies. He read Darwin, and probably Asa Gray's commentaries on evolution. He began to read or reread Emerson seriously, especially after he met the man in Yosemite. He suffered through Ruskin's aesthetics of mountains. His interest in geology, natural history, evolution, and aesthetics became a major theme in his letters. But now, more than in the past, his education was being directed. He tested his reading every day as he wandered in the mountains, discarding ideas which did not harmonize with the reality he lived in. This was a more mature and more studious Muir than the traveller in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, who had no base camp, and who did not know where he was going. On the Walk he had carried Burns' poems, Milton's Paradise Lost, Wood's Botany, and the New Testament. Now his library grew, and it could hardly keep up with his own growing consciousness. |