Melbourne Journal #5, The Grampians

Last weekend, Jen and I visited Grampians National Park, which had come up multiple times when we asked for recommendations for places to go near Melbourne. National Parks in Australia are toned-down versions of what they are in the U.S., requiring no entry fees and receiving significantly less management and volume of people. On the way there, we experienced some small town Australia, camping in the town of Creswick and going to a Saturday Farmer's Market that somehow reminded us of our time Eugene in the late-90s. On the second night, we stayed at a cool youth hostel in Halls Gap, and then we did a one night backpack, bagging a couple of peaks along the way. After a long second day, we had a beer and pub food in Halls Gap, and then camped out one last night before heading home. The Grampians are hotter and drier than Melbourne, and both of us felt that they had a similar feel to the Desert Southwest, which we love. It was yet another enjoyable trip. 

I want to say one final thing about the philosophy of Emerson after my last post, which focused on his notion of self-reliance, by which he means the use of a person's intuition and reasoning faculties to define what is right and what is wrong for them. The pitfall of self-reliance, defined in this way, is that one can go astray. A famous recent example of this (at least in my mind) is the story of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, as told in John Krakauer's book, Into the Wild. The counteracting, and balancing, idea is contained in the essay Compensation, which for Emerson is the law of give-and-take (or balance) in the Universe. Here is Emerson on the topic in Compensation:

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they do not touch him-but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death. 

Here is one of many specific examples that he gives:

Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave their heart, you shall lose your own.

Moreover, 'every advantage has its tax,' so it is important that you pay your debts.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. 

There are many more such examples in the essay, and there is good news as well. 

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm.