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Show 184. and those where these features were notably lacking. The glacial valleys, made of either slate or granite, were rich in life. Thus Muir used the term "yosemite" as both a specific and a geographical term, as a noun, and as an adjective: yosemitic. It is a granite valley, "Branching at head, with beveled and heavily abraded lips at foot. Bottom level, meadowed, laked, or groved." It is a sort of a tree with a mouth. The term "yosemite" is a noun and adjective: Muir might have been more accurate if he had also used the. term as an adverb or verb. The term names part of a process. This is exactly the problem Roderick Nash deals with when he attempts to define wilderness at the beginning of Wilderness and the American Mind. Wilderness is not a place, but a process in Nature. The problem: is a Yosemite a place, a process, or an indication of the quality of the process? Such a problem dissolves when the harsh dividing lines of our conceptions of Nature fade out. In certain philosophers such lines do_ fade out. The very syntax of Heraclitus, for instance, denies these lines. The problem, then, is with human language, not with Nature. We are relearning in small particle physics that Nature does not distinguish between subject, predicate, and modifier. Muir knew botanical classification best, and his analogy between glacial systems and plant images made for a credible metaphor. Nature manifests her love for the number five in her glaciers, as well as in the petals of the flowers which she plants in their pathways. These five Yosemite |