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Show 308. about Man's future. He wrote copiously in his journal: Will he cut down all the trees to make ships and houses? If so, what will be the final and far upshot? Will human destructions like those of Nature - fire and flood and avalanche - work out a higher good, a finer beauty? Will a better civilization come in accord with obvious nature, and all this wild beauty be set to human poetry and song? . . . What is the human part of the mountains' destiny? Was Man's role in the evolution of the North American continent to be destructive? Was this all part of the Plan? Muir had listened to the arguments of the social Darwinists, and entered the dark night of the soul. His journal bears the marks of what Northrop Frye calls "The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy." The sunset, autumn, and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice and the isolation of the hero. Subordinate characters: the traitor and the siren. The archetype of tragedy and elegy. It was a long climb out of those canyons of despair, just as it was a long climb out of the many canyons he traversed between Sequoia groves as he headed south. He heard "a sound of ah-ing in the woods." It is a sound I have heard in late fall, and once when walking among the trees marked to be cut in Yosemite Valley so that a new wing could be built onto the Yosemite Lodge. My friend Dennis rescued me from despair that day. But Muir was |