The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2005/2006

Radical Transcendentalism: Emerson, Muir and the Experience of Nature by James Brannon Palo Alto Center for Science and the Humanities, Palo Alto, CA ©2006 The uniquely American Transcendentalist School which formed in Harvard-influenced 1830\u27s Cambridge brought a New Idea regarding man, spirit, and nature to a young country struggling to find its own voice. As its chief proponent, Ralph Waldo Emerson conveyed a philosophy that was considered radical in its time. The young John Muir, raised in an environment of harsh Puritan sensibilities and Christian dogma, took strongly to the Transcendental ideas as he was introduced to them at the University of Wisconsin. Much of his writing has a clear Emersonian ring to it which underscores his indebtedness to the sage from Concord. But his vision of Transcendentalism grew to be very unlike that of Emerson or any other of the New England group. For Muir, Transcendentalism was an experience of spirituality given meaning by direct physical immersion in nature - particularly her alpine areas. In contrast, Emerson\u27s experience of nature was typified by sight and vision modified by a very active and keen cerebral insight. Emerson as the transparent eyeball became symbolic for the way he experienced the world. How these two men encountered their Transcendentalist lives could not have been more different - in fact radically different. When they finally met in Yosemite in 1871, their pleasant visit belied the differing forces which compelled their thoughts and actions. The young Muir could only conclude that Emerson\u27s ideas of nature began and ended in an abstract metaphysical realm which was frustratingly insufficient to satisfy Muir\u27s spiritual yearnings. Ralph Waldo Emerson was publicly known throughout mid-nineteenth centuiy New England as a radical conveyor of a European Romantic-derived philosophy. Transcendentalism was a uniquely American form of Kantian Idealism which imbued the world with congruence between a higher realm of spiritual truth and a lower one of material substance. Compared to many of his Transcendentalist colleagues - Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau - Emerson looked mildly conservative. But in turn, most of these people would comparatively pale next to a very physical spiritualist who would, by the close of the nineteenth century, perhaps become the most radical Transcendentalist of them all - John Muir. While attending the University of Wisconsin in the 1860\u27s, Muir came under the influence of several transplanted New-Englanders who were versed not only in the novel American Romanticism of Emerson, but who also (Continued on page 4) page 1 Ms & Notes 2006 Birthday/Earth Day - Big Success! The annual celebration of John Muir\u27s birthday and Earth Day Festival at the John Muir Historical Site in Martinez was a tremendous success. Over 900 people participated - the largest attendance ever! ********************************************* Summer 2006 summer programs at LeConte Memorial Lodge The LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite Valley, a National Historic Landmark, was built by the Sierra Club in 1903-04. The unique structure honors eminent University of California geologist Joseph LeConte, an early Director of the Sierra Club who died in the Valley in 1901. The Sierra Club provided the Valley\u27s first public information center, first at a small cottage in the old Yosemite Village, and then at the LeConte Memorial Lodge. The Sierra Club has operated the rough hewn granite and wood Tudor-style as a public Memorial since 1904 presenting and promoting the conservation ethic through public programs, educational displays and a library. About 15,000 visitors per year enjoy this important historical structure due to the efforts of the Sierra Club. For 100 years, a Curator and Sierra Club volunteers have served as summer caretakers providing information to National Park visitors about Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, and the National Park Idea. A library collection includes books on the natural and human history of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada; books by and about Yosemite luminaries like John Muir, Ansel Adams, David Brower; children\u27s nature literature, and Sierra Club books, magazine, and pamphlets. Free programs on natural history, outdoor adventure and conservation issues are presented several evenings each week at 8 P.M., and special day programs for children and families are scheduled throughout the summer, including sketching and poetry workshops, storytelling, and nature walks. These programs for summer 2006 are listed below. All are subject to change, however, so please call ahead to check the schedule. *DENOTES PROGRAMS ESPECIALLY FOR CHILDREN & FAMILIES JUNE 2006 Sunday, June 18 - Bill Carroll, Yosemite Postmaster, 8:00 PM The Mail Must Go Through! Postal Delivery in Yosemite Friday, June 23 - Warren Cederborg, Author, 8:00 PM, Sacred Ground. The Great Myths of Yosemite: A Slide Presentation Saturday, June 24 - David Blackburn, Chief of Interpretation, John Muir National Historic Site, Martinez, 8:00 PM, John Muir At Home *Sunday, June 25 - OPEN HOUSE 7:00-9:00 PM Friday, June 30 - Keith Martin, Sierra Club Outings Leader, 8:00 PM, Adventures in Yosemite Wilderness: Summer & Winter, Matterhorn & Spiller Canyons, Badger Pass to Ostrander Hut, ,Buena Vista Peak & Dewey Point JULY 2006 *Saturday, July 1 - David Bengston, Director, Yosemite Mountaineering School, 8:00 PM, Climbing Yosemite Walls: Demonstration & Slide Program *Sunday, July 2 - OPEN HOUSE 7:00-9:00 PM Friday, July 7 - Professor Richard Wiebe, Fresno Pacific University, 8:00 PM, Words From the Wild!! *Saturday, July 8 - Lee Terkelsen, Nature Photographer & Videographer, 8:00 PM, Along the John Muir Trail: A Narrated Hiking Video Sunday, July 9 - Ron Good, Executive Director, Restore Hetch Hetchy, 8:00 PM, Hetch Hetchy Valley: Yosemite\u27s Lost Twin Friday, July 14 - Sam Roberts, Nature Photographer, 8:00 PM, Mountains & The Spirit of Adventure: A Narrated Slide Program (Continued on page 10) The John Muir Newsletter Volume 16, Number 1 WINTER 2005/2006 Published Quarterly by The John Muir Center for Environmental Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 ♦ STAFF ♦ Director W.R. Swagerty Editor W.R. Swagerty Production Assistant Marilyn Norton Unless otherwise noted, oil photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper Big Brother Obliges His Siblings By Trish Richards Special Collections Assistant, Holt-Atherton Special Collections University of the Pacific Library The correspondences between John Muir and his seven siblings are an endless source of information and provide insight into his personality. John was the third of his parents\u27 eight children. When he was eight years old, his mother gave birth to twin sisters, Ann and Mary. The relationship he has with these much younger sisters may be found in an exchange of letters in 1867 when John is 29 and Mary is 20. Mary wrote to John on April 14, 1867: / know teaching will be of as much benefit to me as going to school and perhaps more, and as our summer teacher is not much further advanced than ourselves, I knew it would be much better than staying at home. I should like very much to study botany and intend to do so ere long, but unless we had someone to help us I am afraid we would not make much progress. I composed these pieces last Feb. and for certain reasons wish you to express your opinion in your next epistle. Tell all their faults, and oblige: All alone I love to wander; All alone I love to be; All alone I love to ponder, In the shade of yonder tree. Sweeter are my thoughts, and better \u27Mong the birds and flowers alone. Severed is the binding fetter Which o \u27er city life is thrown. All alone I love to wander By the rushing river\u27s bank; Time thus spent I do not squander; Time thus spent gives time to think All alone I love to wander, When the earth is draped in gray; When the birds have sunk to slumber, Having sung their evening lay. des \0em continues for eight more stanzas with fine aspirfl^Ve Phrasing and pleasing rhythm. Mary\u27s fton to study botany and her attempt at nature- themed poetry demonstrates a desire to connect to her older brother. Although he is somewhat nurturing, he also obliges and tells all [the poetry\u27s] faults in his response of April 22, 1867: Your poetry, Mary, is good considering your circumstances, and by reading and study in good poetry you may some day write something worth putting away in the corner of your drawer to show to your bairns, etc. I would not spend much time in verse making, but you can scarce spend too much time in cultivating a taste for the beauties and sublimities of nature. Such time is not squandered, as you say. I hope ere this you have been on the oldgray stone pencil in hand. Practice pencilling more than poetry. You can excel in the one, but not in the other. Take pains to procure good books and do not fret about your future. All your duly will be made plain. Keep yourself free in the meantime. Consider that five or six years at least must be devoted to the acquisition of knowledge. According to the Guide and Index to the Microform Edition of the John Muir Papers 1858- 1957 there are about 80 letters between John and Mary, who later marries Willis Hand. This number of correspondence is about average between John and any of his other siblings. All of these letters, and their insights, are available on microfilm worldwide. Most have been transcribed and are available for research at the Holt-Atherton Special Collections. L .1 .■: ft 1 Hlfi .... ■■ . Mary Muir and John Muir in about 1863. John offered Mary some solicited advice on poetry and knowledge in their exchange of letters. (Fiche 23- 1247 and 27-1493, John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust) __^___H page 3 (Continued from page 1) personally knew the Concordian sage.1 Chief among these was Jeanne Carr, who would later pen a note to the young Muir suggesting he travel west to Yosemite. The extent to which he became personally familiar with Emerson\u27s essays, while in Wisconsin, remains unclear. Nevertheless, the Wisconsin influence gave birth to his brand of radical Transcendentalism - a type which compelled him to experience nature in a way that was completely foreign to the New England clique. 1. Nature as refreshing and uplifting: Emerson, in concluding his first published essay, Nature, states: Build therefore your own world ... So fast will disagreeable appearances ... vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south ... so shall the advancing spirit... carry with it the beauty it visits and the song which enchants it. 2 • Muir elegantly, and famously, states in Our National Parks: Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature\u27s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature\u27s peace will flow into you as the sunshine into the trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares dill drop off like autumn leaves. 3 2. The trees in a wind storm: Again, Emerson from Nature: The greatest delight... which the woods minister... They nod to me and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me .... 4 Similarly, Muir in The Mountains of California: We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones,... but our own little journeys ... are only little more than tree-wavings - many of them not so much. 5 3. The unity of all: • Emerson from Nature: A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. 6 In congruence with the above Emersonian vision, Muir states, less elegantly, in My First Summer in the Sierra: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. 7 Muir\u27s quote was perhaps influenced by Emerson\u27s famous quote: Hitch your wagon to a star. 8 Like Emerson, Muir came to understand Transcendentalism as representing that aspect of man\u27s spiritual makeup which seeks to connect with a higher, non-physical reality. But unlike Emerson, Muir knew that this connectivity could only be achieved for him by a direct and physical immersion in what he felt were nature\u27s most grand objects - the wild mountains of California. Both men would later come to realize their differing approaches, while maintaining a respectful interest in each other.9 Emerson\u27s 1836 publication of Nature provided insight into how Emerson preferred to experience nature. In the section entitled Beauty, he emphasizes the eye, sight, and vision. Indeed, in the second paragraph of that section the term eye gets used many times in phrases such as the plastic power of the human eye, The eye is the best of artists, the eye is the best composer, and almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye. 10 Emerson\u27s literal and metaphorical use of the eye and vision underscores his preoccupation with this sometimes passive/sometimes active organ for ascertaining the physical world. In essence, Emerson\u27s chief means of interacting and experiencing nature is through the ocular sense. And, this mode of nature sensing was apparently sufficient to provide all the input he required, to make, in what is almost universally acknowledged, highly original and elegant sense of the human condition. Emerson himself underscores this idea earlier in Nature when he states I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all. 11 Cranch\u27s famous 1836 illustration of Emerson as a walking eyeball was in its day regularly taken as humorous, but essential, Emersonianism.12 As a principle means for communing with nature, sight and vision was apparently sufficient for Emerson - clearly not in the Muir-like manner of a thorough, multi-sense, immersion in nature. As Buell states in his biography, When Emerson exhorts scholars to commune with nature and engage in manual labor, his real interest is invigoration of the mind. 13 In contrasting irony to the ocular Emerson, the young Muir almost lost his sight when a sharp file accidentally pierced his eye. For a month he experienced near total blindness, and contemplated a life without sight. In time though, his vision recovered, engendering an epiphany as he vowed to waste no more time getting to the western page 4 wilderness. Said Muir, God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons. 14 And what a lesson he learned. Upon his 1868 arrival in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Muir\u27s transcendental sense-of-self informed him that he had found his home.15 Using a descriptive language of nature that many readers found new and enthralling, Muir . informed a New York Tribune audience of December 5, 1871 about Yosemite Glaciers. 16 This first attempt to write for publication actually revealed little of the nature-as-god passion which burned so * • brightly within the young Muir. A hundred years later, Muir\u27s antics and experiences in the Siena became the stuff of legend: climbing a tree during a wind storm to experience the swaying back and forth of the tree tops;17 riding an avalanche down a Yosemite canyon;18 terrifying climbs and brutal experiences on mounts Shasta\u2719 Rainier, and Ritter; climbing up Yosemite\u27s snow-laden Indian Canyon in a mid-winter wind storm to see snow-banners unfurled on the Sierra crest;20 crawling to the harrowing top edge of Yosemite Falls so he could look over the precipice;21 climbing to see the top of the 300-foot ice-cone that formed around the base of Yosemite Falls in winter;22 and, of course, providing an early written record (if not the first) of observing the multi-colored and spectrally variegated arc he labeled the moonbow through the nocturnal mist of a full-moon-illuminated Yosemite Falls.23 Muir not only observed nature, but physically and emotionally immersed himself within it - a baptism so to speak. Consider this piece of Muir-ian mysticism: These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God\u27s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be ... the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one\u27s flesh like A y *»*» »:.%■. *?--**\u3c ,r Cranch illustration of Emerson from: www.swarthmore.edu radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure-glow not explainable. One\u27s body then seems homogeneous throughout, sound as a crystal.24 And as Muir stated more directly to Emerson, in an 1872 letter which came less than a year after he and Emerson parted ways in Yosemite, You cannot be content with last year\u27s baptism. \u27Twas only a sprinkle. Come be immersed . . . You will lose no time, nothing but civilized sins . . . Think of the soul lavings and bathings you will get.. . Think of the glow of your afterlife ... Here are the shores of all our eternities .. . Here we may more easily see God. 25 In pursuit of such bathings, Muir often found himself perilously close to death. Whether nearly falling to his death on Mt. Ritter,26 or surviving an overnight blizzard near the top of Mt. Shasta,27 Muir lived passionately. The great Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton once stated that Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die ... He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.28 And so did John Muir live his life - drinking in great gulps and living life to the fullest. The Transcendental nature in this man was clearly not of the same vintage as his less adventurous Harvard-trained New England forebears. In his essay Walking, Henry David Thoreau speaks of Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free ... I may say that mankind progress from east to west... we go westward into the future . . . Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. 29 Similarly, Emerson states in Experience that I am ready to die out of nature, and be bom again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.30 For all the clarity of thinking, and elegance of their wording, these gentlemen could only but dream of what Muir actually did. The irony of their 7 ,M ./.. /j. page 5 words bespeaks individuals who clearly wanted to, but did not, take a higher step into the transcendental realm. Emerson was not a robust individual, and could not engage nature on the same terms with which Muir did. In contrast, Muir\u27s constitution was as a fearless, strong-as- an-ox, mountaineer who gained energy the higher he went. Emerson\u27s way of experiencing nature was in many ways a cerebral hands-off approach. His vision, his sight, was but a limited window into the natural realm - his mind, his intellect, his acute cerebral-ness, being the principal portal. His relatively sedentary lifestyle found him more comfortable sitting at a desk with pen and paper, standing at a podium, or sitting in an easy chair conversing with his friends. Given his many ironic statements of the type, Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity, 31 it is not surprising that fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller sardonically quipped of Emerson: You are intellect, I am life. 32 By modern standards, Emerson was a sedentary observer, a car-camper, a relaxed, wine-sipping, cigar-smoking viewer from the windows of a plush Pullman train car.33 In my favorite journal essay of Emerson\u27s, dated 11 May, 1838, he harkens the reader to come out of your warm, angular house ... into the chill.34 But metaphorically speaking, the real Emerson did not venture out. Edward Abbey in his famous Desert Solitaire, irreverently as ever, addresses all people who would insultingly view Abbey\u27s beloved Canyonlands National Park from the comfort of their car by stating . . .you\u27ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees ... When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you\u27ll see something, maybe. 35 Muir, in his approach to experiencing a higher transcendental realm, understood this. Emerson did not - or would not, or could not. Perhaps he understood his way as sufficient? It is no wonder that Mary Oliver, in her introduction to The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, states that All his wildness was in his head - such a good place for it! 36 The only time Emerson and Muir met was in May of 1871 in Yosemite.37 At that time, the aged Emerson was more than twice as old as his young protege. Muir was to find out that Emerson was more the philosopher of nature than the participant. It is common day lore that the tree- swinging, mountain climbing Muir carried a copy of Emerson\u27s prose works with him in his travels. But it is wrong to assume that this implied full intell