Early to rise

LISTEN. I'm going to miss Writer's Almanac, and items like this about young John Muir, if it really goes away in May. 

One evening the boy was up late reading, and his father forbade him from staying up late, but decided that, as a compromise, he could get up as early as he wanted in the morning. Muir began getting up at 1 a.m. and going to the cellar to work on inventions by the light of a tallow candle. He invented a self-setting sawmill, thermometers, barometers, complex door-locks, an automatic horse-feeding machine, clocks, a firelighter, and many more tools. For motivation in the dark winter mornings, he invented an elaborate clock that also told the day of the week and the month, and was connected to a bed that set him on his feet at an appointed hour.

 HDT, that other patron saint of morning, spurned reliance on alarm clocks: "Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within..." 

But inventive young Muir had at least a matching Genius for the dawn. I'd happily occupy a bed that set me on my feet at the appointed hour too. As he pointed out, “The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” 

The world is big, and the night is more than long enough. Best get an early start on your days. 

Also: Muir was another philosopher of Experience. Like Wordsworth he appreciated the continuum that links interior/subjective life with nature at large. “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in... The sun shines not on us but in us.”

Well, on the best days it does both.

One Two more, these are addictive:

"It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

“John Muir, Earth — planet, Universe" [Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal]”