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Show 252 natural limitations if he were to become whole. There was a certain paradox in a man denying his nature so that he could improve his consciousness, but Muir pressed his thoughts toward their limit, celebrating the appetite of alligators: Honorable representatives of the great saurians of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lillies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty. He continued to discipline himself by rejecting the anthropo-centric point of view, and entertaining the alligator-centric and bear-centric. He sketched an alligator eating a man in his journal. "Men and other bipeds were made for bears, and thanks be to God for claws and teeth so long," he prayed in his animal mood. "Why," he asked, "should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?" Given the post Civil War South as context for this journal, the ravenousness of Nature seemed essentially cleaner and more healthy than the profitless slaughter of men. Muir noticed in passing that "Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty." In point of fact, he had more trouble with humans who preyed on humans - highwaymen, if you will - than he did with natural predators. He was unimpressed with the conversation of southern gentlemen, and noticed the heavy pall which hung over human life in the South, where "fallen parents" like the burned landscape bore "in sad measure the ineffaceable marks of the farthest-reaching and most infernal of all civilized calamities." |