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Show 105. return the mountaineer to his true home in Tuolumne, a new man in a new world, yet the same man in a familiar place. Such is the nature of enlightenment, claim those who believe they know. The journey to Ritter entailed losing one's self and finding it again, the same and yet transformed. The approach to Ritter was a real journey over real mountains, and entailed pain and suffering, but the mountaineer's pain and suffering were only part of a larger spiritual challenge. Muir's narrative was a symbolic structure which embodied that spiritual quest; every incident resonated with meaning. Muir's way became increasingly difficult as he approached his cosmic mountain. He was well beyond the glacial pathways of the middle Sierra. At one point, while trying to cross a ridge, he was forced to retrace his course, after failing to get up a steep slope of hard snow. He had tried to use the technique which had worked well for him on burnished granite, but after slipping several times, found that the concave snow slope would not yield to the same technique which had always worked on the convex domes around Tuolumne. When he finally set foot on the mountain itself, he made his way "into a wilderness of crumbling spires and battlements, built together in bewildering combinations." The almost repetitive use of "wilderness" and "bewildering" is a clue to Muir's problem. He had learned to travel glacial pathways without thought, but now he was in a truly pathless place, and as he said, his instincts, "usually so positive and true, seemed vitiated in some way," and were leading him astray. Ritter was the |