George Perkins Marsh and John Muir: their contrasting styles of writing

    Marsh is an information conveyer; Muir, an emotion conveyer. Marsh writes as a scientist; Muir, as a poet and mystic.

    Here is George Perkins Marsh on the interconnectedness of all parts of nature:

No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temperature, of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by attraction or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. These, again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and the impulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. Every human movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or emotion, every intellectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every such movement, every such act or process affects all the atoms of universal matter. (Quoted from George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature.)

    Here is John Muir on the interconnectedness of all parts of nature:

No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains - beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 341.)

    How is it possible for one person to learn to write well as an information conveyer when that suits the purpose, and as an emotion conveyer when that suits the purpose? Inherited or acquired? Hear Jacob Bronowski:

I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
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    For a brief biography of George Perkins Marsh, click here. For the same of John Muir, click here. For the same of Jacob Bronowski, click here.

Comments

[Aaron Kelson]

Emotion is our first language. Few of us can write as John Muir did but we can usually express our feelings in some way from an early age. Children are not afraid to do this. As we grow older we may learn to speak informatively even as our ability to articulate emotions is refined. Many of us make a mistake (in my opinion) when we believe that either language has to be discarded to make room for the growth of the other. Both can be developed without limit.

Emotional and informative communications are like the yin and yang in Taoist doctrine. They both oppose and produce one another. Neither exists in any fully developed way without the existence of the other. When we stop nurturing one we ironically stop nurturing the other as well.

When one or the other begins to fail taking some kind of refreshment is in order! I have my own methods of refreshing both sides. Other saunterers will certainly have their personal remedies too.

Finally, how does God choose to communicate with us? Doesn't He use both forms effectively? I believe that John Muir would agree with me in saying that He is perfectly skilled in both forms of communication!