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Show 59. As a resident of the mountains, he soon equipped himself with the necessary means to interpret his experience to himself. Yet his reading of Emerson might have reminded him that books were for the scholar's idle times. "When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings." Books were not the tools which would allow him to cross that thin invisible line between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and eternal. So Muir's method of study came to be characterized by the austerity of human resources he allowed himself. He would finally have to listen to Nature, not to men's theories of natural history, aesthetics, or philosophy. Once he was truly a part of the wilderness, he recognized the limits of ideas as tools for revelation. The most obvious problem was the separation between so-called "objective" and "subjective" experience. Despite his desire to uncover a modern scientific theory of mountain building in Yosemite, he could never forget the intense mountain joy he felt. He could never give up this ecstasy for any simply material explanation of the Sierra's geology. So he found himself caught between the "progressive" views of scientists like Darwin, Tyndall, and Gray, and the more personal and traditional attitude of someone like Ruskin. He knew he was unlike the scientists he read. In the summer of 1872, he wrote to Jeanne Carr that he had "a great longing for Gray, whom I feel to be a great, progressive, unlimited man like |