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Show 117. more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested. At the summit of Ritter, he had entered cosmic time, at the origin of creation, and only the wheeling of the sun reminded him that he was also a part of the historical present as well as the cosmic eternal. He was standing at the intersection between templum and tempus, where space and time became one. He had entered sacred time, and while he described the landscape, he was involved in a recreation of the universe. He had become contemporaneous with the creation of the world. As Mircea Eliade has shown, "to wish to reintegrate the time of origin is also to wish to return to the presence of the gods, to recover the strong, fresh, pure world that existed in illo tempore." The re-creation of landscape was also a re-creation of self. Muir had become whole, had become religious man; and his rebirth corresponded to a rebirth of the landscape in the sacred and cosmic presence of deity. I believe it is fair to say that Muir's experience on Ritter is the wilderness experience par excellence. Though it has aesthetic and scientific aspects, it is primarily a religious conversion, followed by a religious vision of a sacred cosmos. His essay on Ritter dramatized what he felt was the primary and archetypal baptism in Nature. Unfortunately, it is never enough to have a vision. One must also justify and explain the significance of that vision, and the structure of Muir's essay on Mount Ritter was designed to do just that. When we approach |