Revista de Letras - Utad

Clouds, streams and paths… 159are common principles among New England intellectuals. As Howe postulates,in their boundless optimism, American Transcendentalists propagated the ideathat through Nature people could transcend the material world and be incommunion with the divine. In their cultivation of the self, Transcendentalistscultivated emotion and moral feelings even when they were regarding Nature,which they saw as a system of analogy: the cosmos taught moral and spiritualprinciples in the guise of spiritual ones. According to Emerson, for instance,individuals have the power to redefine themselves and one of the paths to selfimprovementlies in the self’s receptivity to the impulses of nature. Moreover,Emerson, but also Thoreau and the other New England transcendentalists, wereto provide a cultural atmosphere in which Nature was the path to supremeknowledge (Kazin 1988: 48).In America, and during the nineteenth-century, clouds, watercourses andpaths were conceived as elements in the landscape meant to combine not onlythe description and dissection of landscape attuned to the scientific atmosphereof the time, but also imbued with the idea of spirit. If a close attention to thecharacteristics of places is a function of the desire to know and to dominate, thenthe presence of the elemental is also to translate the fondness of Americans fortranscendental feeling. Moreover, to get close to the elemental is intimatelyrelated to the quintessential American experience of discovering, exploring andmapping, relating also to the idea that the artists who explored the new lands ofAmerica “were rehearsing and reliving Genesis through the landscape” and thattogether, scientists, explorers and artists were “archaeologists of the Creation,uncovering beginnings with all the proprieties of their sacred mission” (Novak1995: 152).So, throughout this paper the terms ‘geography’, ‘nature’ and ‘landscape’appear interchangeably to refer to the physicality and materiality of Americanterrain, that part of America that because of its underdevelopment, wildness andvastness has made a great impression on the mind of Europeans. Moreover agreat passion characterizes the relationship between Americans and nature, sothat nature has been invested with metaphysical meaning, something Leo Marxsees as highly significant for it lends American nature its peculiar efficacy as arepository of timeless value and meaning and as an object of worship (1964: 41).Though briefly, to consider the literary representations of clouds, streamsand paths as they are used by authors such as Thoreau, Cather, Steinbeck andOliver is to consider them as the result of the attention to the natural worldderived from the scientific curiosity which imbued American beginnings, andalso as symbols of the desire for movement and fluidity, aspects consilient withthe American mind and thought.