Reflections on Muir's Curious Prose Style in My First Summer in the Sierra

My First Summer in the Sierra is John Muir's fascinating account of his walking trip one summer through late nineteenth century Merced, California while accompanying a herd of sheep and their shepherds. Right away one is struck by his unusual prose style, which in light of modern conventions of taste and what makes for suitable academic rhetoric appears paradoxically both naive and learned. Reflecting the era's nascent Darwinian understanding of biodiversity, his observations mix the poetic with the scientific, thrilling readers with his richly emotional sense of the Central Valley landscape. For example, much in the manner of a child, Muir records early in his journey his thoughts as to the motivation behind the existence of poison ivy, as if the plant were something personally conceived of and created by divine revelation: ("Like most other things not apparently useful to man, [poison ivy] has few friends...Why was it made....?'"). Conversely, on other occasions, he describes examples of biological life with an altogether different tone and purpose, ones more materialist and less Romantic: ("The flowers of this species (Saxifraga peltata) are purple, and form tall glandular raceme that are in bloom before the appearance of the leaves."). Now, on the one hand, I understand both the need and wisdom of say, the science writer in doing his best to minimize his ideological beliefs in what he writes professionally. After all, when recording or presenting information for experimentation purposes, it is important to try hard not to be distracting by writing in an ostentatious prose style that might obscure the point of a set of data or a theory. However, it is the very embrace by Muir of his subjective experience that makes Summer so timeless a piece of conservationist writing. To be fair, he is not writing a scientific research paper but rather a personal journal of sorts, where he marks his thoughts, feelings, and impressions of the world around him. Although not exactly a young man at the time, (the average lifespan by the turn of the twentieth century 31 years later was 49 years of age), he manages to present a boyish enthusiasm for the natural world, unafraid of peppering his observations with the occasional exclamation mark to more effectively register his emotion: (“How deep our sleep last night in the mountain’s heart, beneath the trees and stars, hushed by solemn-sounding waterfall and many small soothing voices in sweet accord whispering peace!). 

My curiosity and appreciation for Muir’s prose deepened as I continued to consider the reasons why one seldom if ever encounters such a style in modern academic writing. Partially responsible is the twentieth century's greater emphasis on specialization, objectivity, and abstraction in standards of professional writing. In the trade-off for the more rarified brand of understanding that specialization tends to bring is the lesser valuing of the idea of beauty. As the focus in the discourse communities of the natural sciences has grown more necessarily narrow, aesthetic concerns about the natural world appear to have become less relevant. Most academic writers would probably be too embarrassed to ever discuss their subjective experience of the beauty of the natural world in their professional writing, thinking the concept of beauty itself largely a matter of social construction, and therefore subject to or indicative of cultural bias. And given our age’s obsession with political correctness and the consequences professionally for not internalizing what has been deemed acceptable by the arbiters of what makes for socially acceptable discourse, such a reluctance is understandable, however disappointing. 

I do not claim to see a way around this problem, if it is indeed a problem, nor am I making an argument that academia's current direction toward greater specialization and cultural sensitivity does not in fact represent by and large social goods from an intellectual and cultural perspective. But I do suggest that such a loss as Muir's prose's amalgam of the romantic and the scientific constitutes a kind of imaginative poverty for many readers and writers, as his words in Summer testify to the rhetorical power that is possible when a writer boldly embraces their sense of the beautiful while balancing their objective understanding of the material processes that allow the wonder that is nature to be intelligible to the sensitive observer.