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Show 171. views, these individual canyons and particular glaciers would become part of the integrated system of life which was the Sierra. PALIMPSEST, POLISH, AND PATH When he described the world as a palimpsest in his journal of A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, he was implying that Nature was a Book. The passage itself dramatized his own aspirations to be a future translator of Nature. When a page is written over but once it may be easily read; but if it be written over and over with characters of every size and style, it soon becomes unreadable, although not a single confused meaningless mark or thought may occur among all the written characters to mar its perfection. Our limited powers are similarly perplexed and overtaxed in reading the inexhaustible pages of nature, for they are written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence. There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All together form the one grand palimpsest of the world. Justice requires that we see Muir's metaphor was subtler than Agassiz's. Already he had a conception which would allow him to see the signs of the present and the signs of the past |