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[39], chapter three Muir’s Multiple Discourses “The book you speak of is not commenced yet, but I must go into winter quarters at once and go to work” (Badè 1924; LL 219). Muir wrote this letter from Yosemite on 2 November 1875, during the first winter snowfall, which suggests that he was already late to be able to retreat to the Bay area and write a book. It was to be almost twenty more years before his first book was published. He was still at the early stage of his career as a writer. He wrote in this letter that his article “Living Glaciers of California” was just about to be published in Harper’s Monthly. It was only four years since his first article, also about these living glaciers, shattered the professional establishment view that active glaciers did not exist there and that glaciation could not have been responsible for the formation of Yosemite Valley since it was the result of a single cataclysm. But what is most significant is Muir’s next sentence, explaining why he needed to withdraw from Yosemite in order to write: “While in the field I can only observe—take in, but give nothing out.” Muir felt a distinction between the life he lived in the valley and the pressure put on him by his Oakland and San Francisco friends Jeanne Carr and John Swett, the latter of whom “orders me home to booking,” he wrote to Carr (218). Actually he spent the winter and spring of 1875–76 at Swett’s house in San Francisco working his journals and letters into articles, rather than a book, for which his friends would have to wait twenty years. It was not until he was fifty-five years old that Muir published his first book, The Mountains of California (1894), which the members of the newly formed Sierra Club were eagerly anticipating as the bible of the club. In 1872 Muir had written from Yosemite, “Book-making frightens me because it demands so much artificialness and retrograding. . . . These mountain fires that glow in one’s blood are free to all, but I cannot find the chemistry that may press them unimpaired onto booksellers’ bricks” (198). But by 1902 Muir had realized that books were what would make the impact that he desired on the culture. He wrote a letter listing six books that he says “I am now at work on” (343), only two and a half of which would be completed by the time of his death in 1914 (The Yosemite, Travels in Alaska, and half of “my autobiography which 39 40 muir’s multiple discourses [40], for ten years or more all sorts of people have been begging me to write” in My Boyhood and Youth). This tension between being out in the field and being closeted in town writing about it reveals several significant aspects of Muir’s mode of working that are crucially informative and affirmative of modern dilemmas for writers who, while wishing to engage with environmental issues, want to be out there, doing it. “The book you speak of” can, in a sense, only be written by not being in Swett’s house on Taylor Street, San Francisco, sitting at a desk upstairs, but on the glassy, herringboned slabs of Yosemite, walking upward and outward toward new discoveries that must have, in Muir’s mind, delayed any book project further. Muir had already spent nine months at the McChesney house in Oakland during 1874 working on the seven articles for the Overland Monthly that became known as Studies in the Sierra (1874–75; LL 389–478). Muir clearly had an awareness that the discourse of books was not beyond him—not simply a sense that he had books in him, but that his experience and the growing readership of his essays demanded books—and this must have been present for those twenty years yet to come of exploring and reading and writing his essays. It may be that the essay form was actually not only the form for him but also for his subject. Again and again we discover that the essay is a crucial form for personal engagement with the world and for case studies of that experience . In chapter 11 I argue that the essay is perhaps the best form for exploring the intense and relatively brief engagements with nature undertaken by the rock climber. This is certainly true for Muir’s mountaineering...

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