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Show 203. NATURE AND ART Writing for the public did not come easily for him, because he suspected that the understanding of a general audience was limited. He was not even certain that his message could be communicated; after all, the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. An inventory of the sort of audience he might reach suggests his problem. There were his close friends from Wisconsin, like Emily Pel ton, an old schoolmate. There were his brothers and sisters, his mother. There were the Carrs, who might find his vision appealing. There were geologists and botanists he met before and after coming to reside in Yosemite. They came for their own scientific purposes, satisfied themselves, and left, unchanged. They were already buttressed by their professional duties, and thus not truly free to see. There were the tourists themselves, and Muir had met plenty of them; easterners and westerners, he never distinguished between them. Whatever they were doing while "doing" Yosemite, he knew that it didn't lead to anything like the spiritual rebirth he had in mind. We see them now in the novels of Henry James or William Howells, or in Veblen's leisure class. They are not very different from present-day Americans of their class. Muir's attitude toward this public was ambivalent at best. If his reader would be one of the tourists he had seen in |