| OCR Text |
Show 62. King did so against his feelings, and because Ruskin "helps us to know himself, not the Alps." But Muir knew that no desire to separate oneself from the world could be successful. In the mountains, on the mountains, a part of the mountains; a man had to listen to the music he heard. There are no harsh, hard dividing lines in nature. Glaciers blend with the snow and the snow blends with the thin invisible breath of the sky. So there are no stiff, frigid, stony partition walls betwixt us and heaven. There are blendings as immeasurable and untraceable as the edges of melting clouds. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, etc., is applicable here, for earth is partly heaven, and heaven earth. If there were no dividing lines in Nature, then why in the world should a man try to fragment himself? This was the lesson of Tuolumne Divide, where Muir realized that a glacier had flowed uphill and over a ridge into Tenaya Canyon. This was a lesson about life. The tops of the mountains flowed into the bottom of heaven, the finite merged with the infinite. The message to man was clear, "When you get to the top of the mountain, keep on climbing." When he had accepted himself, all of himself in the mountains, he had found a kind of practical immortality in "vast, calm, measureless mountain days." Even when he wrote in his journal in August, "this good and tough mountain-climbing flesh is not my final home, and I'll creep out of it and fly free and grow," he knew that he had already tasted immortality. But he continued |
