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Show 173 in a period of decay, neither alive nor essentially related to the world they nourished. The metaphor of Nature as Book seemed to go dead in Muir's hand, and he wisely left it at the beginning of his essay, turning to the life and death of Yosemite glaciers, trees, and animals. The past was not indelible, he thought in 1871, but was being written over by a new and vital present even while he studied. When he reforged the palimpsest in the Studies, he did so because he was prepared to move beyond a dead metaphor, into a more complex vision of the Creator's Plan. Now he could see that the glacial history of the Sierra merged imperceptibly into the post-glacial era. The ice-sheet of the glacial period, like an immense sponge, wiped the Sierra bare of all pre-glacial surface inscriptions, and wrote its own history upon the ample page. We may read the letter-pages of friends when written over and over, if we are intimately acquainted with their handwriting, and under the same conditions we may read Nature's writings on the stone pages of the mountains. Glacial history upon the summit of the Sierra page is clear, and the farther we descend, the more we find its inscriptions crossed and recrossed with the records of other agents. Dews have dimmed it, torrents have scrawled it here and there, and the earthquake and avalanche have covered and erased many a delicate line. Groves and meadows, forests and fields, darken and confuse its more enduring characters along the bottom, until only the |