Preview
Circa Date
circa 1887
Transcription
45
Gl [Glacial] Records etc
Nothing goes unrecorded. Every word [evoked by the] of [falling leaf] leaves [& falling] snowflakes & particles of dew shimmering fluttering falling as well as [the] earthquakes & avalanches are written down in natures book though human eye [& ear] cannot detect the handwriting of any but the heaviest. Every event is both written & spoken. The wing marks the sky as well as making stir in sounding words & the winds all know it & feel it & tell it. Glaciers make the heaviest mark of any eroding agent & write their histories in heaviest lines. And as we can in some measure read & recall the forms & songs of dried up streams [after they are dried up] by walking in their channels so we can read the history of glaciers by tracing their channels centuries after they have vanished. & here the difficulty is not so much on account of lightness or dimness as of magnitude the characters are so large it is difficult to see them from top to bottom in one view.
Winds & streams following the pathways of the vanished glaciers are fine preachers & interpreters of their ancient grandeur & never cease to proclaim it night or day
46
Gl [Glacial] Records etc
Glaciers avalanches & torrents are the pens [of] with wh [which] nature produces written characters most like our own, & every cañon of the Sierra displays examples of this writing.
Much notice had been taken [said] of the writing on the wall of the Persian Kings palace but there is a writing on every wall. & though like palimpsests these pages are written line upon line & crossed again & again none of [the earlier writing] these old palimpsests is ever wholly obliterated. & no other effacement or obscurement is made save by the writing of other scriptures over those that have gone before
Along the bottom [of] The Sierra, regarded as one page, [it] is much blurred & wrinkled For the sun & soil & rain [has] have given birth to a multitude of trees & shrubs & mantling grasses. Floods innumerable have washed it not to mention the constant erosion of the atmosphere
The meaning of all storms is love whether like Glacial Periods they last for tens of thousands of years flooding [half] the world with [fire] ice, or volcanic periods flooding it with fire, or [like] avalanches & earthquakes lasting only a moment
Date Occurred
1871-1874
Resource Identifier
MuirReel31 Notebook11 Img026.jpg
Contributing Institution
Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library
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