Revista de Letras - Utad

158 Isabel Maria Fernandes Alvesthese authors demonstrate keenness towards the reading of the earth and theparticulars of the American landscape. Like the explorers and scientists of thenineteenth-century, these American authors also read the significant forms andmovements of the land, an attitude which is consilient with the quintessentialAmerican experience of discovering, exploring and mapping. In the nineteenthcenturyAmerica was a country being made into landscape, so, side by side,scientists and artists dissected, described, and classified the rocks and animals,plants, and the changing meteorological phenomena. From the beginning of theEuropean colonization, American geography has been at the center of Americanthought and art. It is at the center of American paradoxes as well.Though politics and advertising project an American national geographywhich is broadly misleading and imprecise, parallel to the false images, and asBarry Lopez exposes in “American Geographies”, strives a more intimateknowledge of local geography, that is, of geology, hydrology, biology, andweather (2004: 90). In this sense, geography is the knowledge that identifiessomething in the land we recognize and respond to. It gives us a sense of placeand a sense of community, both of which are indispensable to an individual’sand a country’s state of well-being (2004: 96). Though the relationship betweenlandscape and the American self may have been paradoxical, there is aprominent current in American literary tradition which has been inseparablefrom a process Lorraine Anderson designates as “a movement from seeingnature as kin to seeing nature as self” (Anderson 2002: 9). Henceforth clouds,streams and paths are presented in this paper as configurations which tell of therelationship between American geography and the American self, or betweenphysical American geography and geographies of mind. The chosen authors aimat attributing a meaning to the multiplicity of places, and therefore to theconstruction of a metaphysical landscape capable of expressing their characters’spiritual yearnings. This cultural and literary American journey was greatlyinfluenced by Alexander Humboldt, the German geographer, who was the firstscientist to be interested not only in the visible phenomena – the physiognomy ofa place –, its geological and botanical characteristics, but who has pointed out asingular way for studying nature: to merge exploration and observation withflashes of transcendence (Novak 1995: 67). Therefore, and from the outset,Humboldt, who influenced Emerson and Edwin Church, reinforced therelationship between mind and perception, attributing an ontologicalexpressiveness to the landscape which requires understanding and interpretation.In addition, the singular voice of nature in America is closely related to theidea of movement, which the American Romantics and Transcendentalists wereto praise intensely. In Making the American Self, as Daniel Howe illustrates, thepractice of self-construction and the belief that life is a process of self-realization