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Show 175. Muir believed that the student was obliged not only to read the blurred pages of the past, but actually to live in history. He dramatized this sense of comingling present and past by combining the central metaphor of Nature as Book with the central theme of the Studies, that apparent destruction is in fact creation. When Nature lifted the ice-sheet from the mountains she may well be said not to have turned a new leaf, but to have made a new one of the old. . . . to be repictured with young life, and the varied and beautiful inscriptions of water, snow, and the atmosphere. The mountains were but one leaf of the tree of life, or one page out of the most recent Book of Nature. God had written many such texts. No doubt some had been entirely erased. But the reborn Sierra was quite young, its face scarcely aged, and its physiognomy still strictly glacial. Nevertheless, Muir did not claim that he could translate this book of mountain history fully, any more than we can know a man's character entirely by his face. Instead, he directed his reader to the mountains themselves, to books on glaciology, and to the active glaciers of Alaska. He was simply admitting that his Studies was not to be taken as a primary text. His book represented only a brief meeting of theory with close study. He could not describe the myriad paths of natural history, but could only describe how he found one path. The Sierra itself was multidimensional in time and space. Its Path was not like the linear argument of a book, but was a |