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Show 379. when the readers of Muir's essays said, "Make i t pretty, John, make us feel at home and comfortable in the wilderness," they were asking him to mediate for them. They did not want to expend the necessary e f f o r t to understand. For years he had been warning his friends and readers to beware of f i r s t impressions, since a real understanding of Nature came from d i s c i p l i n e d contemplation, from suspended disbelief. But from the l a t e 1870's on, he was writing for an eastern audience which would get i t s wilderness at home, in the parlor. He would provide with a r t the immediate pleasures which they had not received through t h e i r l i v e s , so that they might be converted to a b e l i e f that wilderness was important. He was beginning to aim a t a strategy which Wallace Stegner picked up in 1960, the view of "wilderness as opportunity and idea." He wanted the eastern audience to recognize that wilderness, even if they never entered i t , was part of their "geography of hope." Muir knew t h a t the genteel audience would not be coming out to California t h i s winter to get a f i r s t hand look at the "Snow Banners of the California Alps." But in the a r t i c l e by t h a t name he could try out, as a tentative experiment, the r o l e of a mannered, civilized, and cultured n a r r a t o r . This seems so out of character, one wonders what led Muir to t h i s kind of conventional a r t i f i c e. Perhaps he was t r y i n g to show himself he could do i t ; perhaps he was yielding to a challenge offered by h i s friends in San Francisco; perhaps he was even saying to William Keith, "Well, if you can paint a p i c t u r e of the Sierra, so can I." |