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Show 377. doesn't l i e , the twentieth century says, m the nineteenth century, the i l l u s t r a t o r , whatever his medium, had the same tremendous power to c r e a t e the " r e a l i t y " presented in a picturesque book. One might even go a step further and ask if picturesque America or Gentle Wilderness used t h e i r written texts to f i l l the i n t e r s t i c e s between paintings, etchings, or photographs. A picturesque book i s f i n a l l y a picture book, designed for use on a parlor t a b l e , just as c e r t a i n paintings are no more than decoration for parlor walls. (I must say that film brings in a new element. DeWitt Jones, for instance, tried to capture in his f,ilm about Muir's Sierra, not scenes, but the larger conception of Nature as flow; the film was crafted not simply to show individual images, but to capture the flow of sunlight and seasons.) One must remember t h a t Muir himself invited t h i s kind of approach to his w r i t i n g s . When he began to use the language of the picturesque, when he began to play an active part in selecting and e d i t i n g the i l l u s t r a t i o n s for his essays, when pictures began to play a l a r g e r part in his own exposition, he was allowing t h a t a p i c t u r e r e a l l y was worth a thousand words. This descent to the picturesque, which sacrificed a sense of place for a e s t h e t i c s e n s i b i l i t y , was no doubt a yielding to the exigencies of public t a s t e . Just as he could hecome moderate and l e a r n to use the language of the pastoral ideal, so too he could use the humanistic language of the aesthete, the language which placed natural scenes in human categories. |