OCR Text |
Show 79. would be more faithful to the primary influences on his life. Emerson had suggested the significance of the Transcendental experience in Nature: In the woods, we return to reason and faith. . . . all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God . . . In the wilderness . . . man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. But this kind of disembodied experience was suspiciously empty. For instance, Emerson could not decide whether the power to produce this cosmic state of mind resided in Man or in Nature. Even his colleagues in Concord suspected that Emerson's Nature was too etherialized, too abstract, and as a result they further suspected that Emerson saw not Nature at all, but himself. From the beginning of his stay in California, Muir discarded the image of the "transparent eyeball," and began to speak of the human body as a "sponge steeped in immortality." He was delighted to find that the body contained "such multitudes of palates, or that this mortal flesh, so little valued by philosophers and teachers, was possessed of so vast a capacity for happiness." He could delight in purely animal pleasures, and was sure that these too had their spiritual satisfactions. When Muir read and annotated Emerson's Essays in the Sierra, he found himself disagreeing with the Concord sage. Edwin Way Teal has recorded the most striking of Muir's departures. Emerson observes: "There is in woods and waters a certain |