He Took to the Woods.

It happens to everyone. Sometimes, you just want to run away. Go live in the woods. Embrace the wild and forget the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this urge. But he warned John Muir in a letter that the solitude of wilderness is “a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife”. He was urging Muir to come to Massachusetts, to “bring to an early close your absolute contracts with any yet unvisited glaciers or volcanoes”. Emerson felt the best way to experience the wild was to visit; Muir wanted to live among the trees, the rocks, the wild itself.

I’m summarizing the oldest environmental conflict in the book. Do we want to preserve the wild as separate from us or do we want to appreciate it as a part of us? If we do the first, we cut off a part of humanity’s soul. The second, we destroy that same part. It’s the type of conflict that is unresolvable, because both sides are ultimately right.

In addition to being an environmentalist, Muir was also a bit of a mechanical genius. The type of person who understood how parts work together. At the turn of the century, that type of person was the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg today. Muir could easily have made money. Loads of it. And while he was never really that inclined towards that money, he did go to the University of Wisconsin, and then, in 1867, was working in an Indianapolis carriage shop. While he was there, as Roderick Nash describes, a piece of carriage pierced his eye, so hard that it literally fell out into his hand. He stared at his own eye with the other one, until his second eye went into sympathetic nervous shock. He was blind for a month.

After that experience, Muir took to the wild. Life is short, as he had just learned, and he wanted to go experience it. So, he left.

Muir only returned from the wild (not literally, but go with me here) twice after that. The first was when he tried to publicize his writings about the wild. And the second was when he got married. Both of those times, he left not just the wild, but the solitude of the wild.

And he was miserable.

Oh, he tried. Of course he tried. But something was missing. He went to Alaska of his own accord after the first attempt. After the second, his wife told him to leave, because she knew he wasn’t happy. When he wasn’t in the wild, Muir thought he wasn’t experiencing life. And honestly, I feel him. It’s not just nature. It’s also the solitude of it. Everything you are doing you know you are doing because you, and only you, either need to or want to. You are alone, your thoughts are going wherever they need to go. It is the ultimate freedom. There are no restrictions, you grow to unlimited heights, wherever you need to. And if that freedom is not experience, what is?

Except…it’s not. Experience is great. But an experience you can have is dwarfed by the sheer quantity of experiences you can share with others. If x is experience, experiences with others is x^n. You are colliding into people constantly, doing things constantly. Maybe you aren’t doing exactly what you want all the time, but you are always doing something.

And that’s just the random experiences that you can have with random people. Then there are the deeper experiences you have with people who are special to you. Those are like nothing else. Having a child or a sister or a lover, it’s not just unique and powerful and inspiring. It’s something you literally cannot do alone. Through other people, you grow.

Ultimately, of course, you need a balance. Too much solitude and you hit a point where you grow no further. Too much interaction never allows you to process anything for growth. But that balance is different for everyone. And in the modern age it’s not always expressed through wilderness and civilization. It’s not a question of deciding to live on the frontier or not. Instead it’s a choice you make time and time again, day after day. Today’s world is quite literally knocking on your door all the time — through your phone, your computer, your tablet. And you have to ask yourself every minute of every day — how often should I let all these other people in? Should I be an Emerson or a Muir?