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Thoreau made two attempts to climb Mt Ktaadn in Maine and failed because the mountain was smothered in wind-blown clouds, though it almost seems he found the raw wildness of the place as daunting and impassable as the billowing cloud-cover. It was on the descent that Thoreau’s experience of existential CONTACT occurred: a moment where all the explanations and assumptions fell away…his failure left him open to absorb unexpected implications of his disorienting experience on the mountain…his reason became “dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtil, like the air” as he faced “vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature…
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