John Muir, Travels in Alaska

Here's the thing: professionally, in my academic life, I've been bashing the Romantics for decades. Self-important wankers, the lot of them, even if their poetry's gorgeous, even when their poetry's formatted as prose: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, all of them.

Their writing can be gorgeous, though, can't it?

This past week, I've been in the company of John Muir through his book Travels in Alaska. (I was reading this one, but Project Gutenberg is also a thing.) Muir was many things in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but in his Alaskan prose was certainly a Romantic: "How delightful it is, and how it makes one's pulses bound to get back into this reviving northland wilderness!" (p157).

It's lovely, the way his descriptions let you feel so intimately with him, such as his excitement at an intensely damp environment, when he awakes in hard rain one morning near what he calls the Big Stickeen Glacier:

"Surely never a particle of dust has touched leaf or crown of all these blessed mosses; and how bright were the red rims of the cladonia cups beside them, and the fruit of the dwarf cornel! And the wet berries, Nature's precious jewelry, how beautiful they were!--huckleberries with pale bloom and a crystal drop on each; red and yellow salmon-berries, with clusters of smaller drops; and the glittering, berry-like raindrops adorning the interlacing arches of bent grasses and sedges around the edges of the pools, every drop a mirror with all the landscape in it" (p85).

There's a wild joy in Muir's writing, in his every moment, even when he's simply cataloguing the various species of mosses or flowering plants. It's a credit to Muir and to his country that this kind of joy could spark the formation of the American system of national parks, the genesis of multiple conservation organizations, and a century's worth of a highly specific strain of counterculture. Few things are as beautiful or as compelling as a Romantic writer in full flight, and Muir's flights are among the very best.

On the other hand, well, it's 2025. You know how America's behaving. Certainly I don't blame Muir directly for that, but American exceptionalism lives also in his delight in empty spaces, his thirst for purity in his experiences and in the species he seeks and catalogues, and his appetite for exploration of places already known to their inhabitants, none of whom he centres on his page.

And gosh, his attitudes toward the Indigenous peoples he met.

When he praises their construction skills: "The completeness of form, finish, and proportion of these timbers suggested skill of a wild and positive kind, like that which guides the woodpecker in drilling round holes, and the bee in making its cells" (p56).

Alaskan people build well because they're basically insects or birds?

Or the long quotations (most of the book's longest inclusions of voices other than Muir's own) that Muir reports from chiefs after traditional dancing has taken place: "this is the way we used to dance. We liked it long ago when we were blind, we always danced this way, but now we are not blind," and from a different chief, "You have led us into strong guiding light and taught us the right way to live and the right way to die" (p29).

I mean....

Alaska's a wild place, sure, but it's a wild place where Alaskan native people keep stopping by in canoes offering to sell him salmon for ten cents each. They're not driving food trucks, and it's not a parking lot, but Muir's not genuinely exploring unless he's on top of or behind a glacier. And we know that (even though he is, genuinely, often on top of or behind a glacier).

John Muir's prose is gorgeous, I'm jealous of his encounters in Alaska, and I wish more people had Muir's capacity for love or wisdom, let alone his capacity for both at once.

But some of contemporary America's roots are in John Muir's prose. They're not only in the kinds of  materials more readily tied to Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the rest of them.

As much relief and pleasure as I felt in reading Travels in Alaska, and truly I sometimes felt great pleasure in this book, nothing here tempted me to stop bashing Romantics, or blaming them for some chunk of America's current despicable behaviour.

It's a funny old world, is it not?