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Show 99 m to hone the edge of these kinds of simple exercises so that he light show how important they were. "The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness," he once wrote. Yet Thoreau had said, "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." After two years at Walden he thought he had fallen into predictable paths which had become ruts. Muir too would leave his life in Yosemite, yet he was far less sure that he wished to leave. There was a pivotal point, in September of 1874, when he returned to Yosemite for a short stay, and he wrote to Jeanne Carr, I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. . . . Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me have not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing. Did this mean that he meant "to give himself to the task of interpreting wilderness for others?" Were his years in the Sierra only a preparation for him? Or could he entice people to "look at Nature's loveliness" only as long as he continued to be "hopelessly and forever a mountaineer?" Was the glacial eye to become a tool for social change? Was his old friends' view finally right - would he indeed accept their refining social influences? Many who live by the model of his life believe that these |