Word: muir
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Contemporary writers on the American environment, Rick Bass, for example, worship in the church of Muir: "Must we break everything that is special to us, or sacred--unknown, and holy--into halves, and then fourths, and then eighths? What happens to us when all the sacred, all the whole, is gone--when there is no more whole?" Montana evokes for Thomas McGuane "a terrific evangelical silence." Faith is by definition irrational--it is, in fact, a little like fire...
...JOHN MUIR...
Whether climbing Alaskan glaciers or guiding Teddy Roosevelt through Yosemite National Park, left, Scottish-born John Muir saw wilderness as something quasi-spiritual, where "tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people" could find renewal. As a nature writer and the Sierra Club's founding president, he argued eloquently for preservation, as when he battled to save Yosemite's beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley--you might "as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches," he fumed. Muir lost, yet his words still echo with each new threat to wild places...
...whiff of disingenuousness clings to him. He has chosen homespun robes, he says, because they make "the most sense" and help avoid a textile industry that "enslaves its workers." Still, living much as Jesus did--declining money and subsisting on charity--is key to winning supportive friends. Says Connie Muir, whose daughter and son-in-law housed him for two months last fall: "He speaks to the deepest part of your soul." And Joseph sees possibilities in this land of shuttered mines. "There's a faith waiting to come out. It's like a beautiful heart is under there...
...David W. Muir '67, director of library security, echoed McNamara, saying students should use common sense in the libraries...