Seeing or Saving

Good morning, I hope my peers are as excited as me to answer Julie's midterm questions. I figured it best to get the weekly chores done first before climbing that mountain however, so here goes. After much thought, I have decided to compare and contrast some text from Thoreau's "Autumnal Tints" and Muir's "Wild Wool".


The essense of Thoreau's text has two focal points. The first being a descripitive commentary on the nature of the seasons and its effects on the indigenous botanical species of the New England area. "I have observed this tree for several autumnals invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its fruits earlier than another. It might mark the season, perhaps." Scientifically, fall is a period of cooling weather and shortend sunlight. Fall weather informs a tree to reduce chlorophyll production. This absence allows the colors from other pigments like carotenoids and anthocyanim to be viewed. It is actually the colors of these trapped sugars that produces the yellow, brown, orange, reds and purples to be visible. Although, Thoreau does not actually get into the chemistry of autumn, his text merely proposes the question and desire to understand this transformation, perhaps it could be benificial.

The second purpose of Thoreau's text is an attempt to inspire the eye of the soul to gaze upon the beauty of nature. "A simple tree becomes thus, the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression of the whole surrounding forrest is at once more spirited for it." He goes to great lengths to capture this essence, and empties every descriptive word from his arsenal to captivate his audience. Unfortunately, he realizes that most people are to busy for this. "Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly." Thoreau seems deeply saddened by this, yet acquiesces to mankind's utilization of nature for gain. It is in these sentiments that Thoreau's text drastically differs from Muir's.

Muir's "Wild Wool" is a bold statement against the destrucetion of nature's beauty. He begins by lambasting mankind's so called progress. "Moral improvers have calls to preach. I have a friend who has a call to plough, and woe to the daisy sod or azalea thicket that falls under the savage redemption of his keen steel shares." Muir's attitude has no inclination to applaud progress, in fact "Wild Wool" mocks industry and ingenuity.

Like a boxer, toying with his adversary, he throws a jab for wildness. His friends response, "Culture is an orchard apple; Nature is a crab." Gloves up, he plunges forward, distinguishing that his sentiments differ from his friends, "barbarous notion." Masterfully, he employs the qualities of the wool he discovers among the wild rams of the Shasta mountains. "My companions stooped down and examined the fleeces for themselves, pulling out tufts and ringlets, spinning them between their fingers, and measuring the length of staple, each in turn paying tribute to wildness." Muir establishes nature's superiority through his companions evaluation. Like Thoreau, Muir goes to great lenth to describe the essence of beauty in which the wool represents to the ram. He however, implores the divinity of creation in order to impede man's ridiculous assumption that his progress is an improvement. "Furthermore, it will be observed that these wild modifications are entirely distinct from those which are brought chancingly into existence through the accidents and caprices of culture; the former being inventions of God for the attainment of definite ends."

Muir is a pure fighter, and after toying with his humorous wool rhetoric, starts throwing haymakers. "No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchalleged."

His adversary clearly bloodied, Muir goes in for the knockout finishing with science. "Desirable breeds blundered upon by long series of groping experiments are often found to be unstable and subject to disease--bots, foot rot, blind-staggers, etc. causing infinite trouble, both amony breeders and manufactures. Would it not be well, therefore for some one to go back as far as possible and take a fresh start." What a fight.

Clearly, both author's texts establish a need to understand and appreciate the Earth in which we live, there's no question as to the difference in lengths both are willing to go though as far a words are concerned.