Revista de Letras - Utad

162 Isabel Maria Fernandes Alveson a Romantic Image, Jeffrey Robinson expands on the fluid transactions thewalk brings forth: “I offer myself to unpredictable occurrences andimpingements. The world flows past my body (…)” (1989: 4). Here one sees thesuccession of phenomena serving as an associative stimuli and the externalworld offering itself to the walker’s open mind, this way the walk forcing themind to change continually in accordance to the shifting landscape. Therefore,and as stated by the critic John Elder, walking is an activity which integratesinner and outer world:Just as the wasteland and the wilderness are reconciled through earth’scircuit of soil-building decay, the landscape and imagination may be unitedthrough the process of walking. The mind’s flicker of attention from theearth to its own associations seems on one level to have an inescapablebinary quality. But mental sunlight and clouds are also borne out under alarger sky in the meandering circuit of the poet’s walk. Walking becomesan emblem of wholeness, comprehending both the person’s conscious stepsand pauses and the path beneath his rising and falling feet (Elder 1985: 93).As Thoreau and Oliver’s writing testifies, the path is an image which evokesthe knowledge of place as well: the particulars of time, weather and landscapecontinually inform the walker’s consciousness. The same image and symbolismtake place in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), whoseaction describes the nineteenth-century missionary Bishop Latour travellingalong old Southwestern paths. The reader faces a character whose experiencecomes from a close relationship to the landscape, and in opposition to Europeanviews, acknowledges the native’s understanding of the land; when travellingwith Eusabio, a native with whom he is travelling to Santa Fé, he comments thatit is like travelling with the landscape made human. Eusabio accepts chance andweather as the country did, with a sort of grave enjoyment (Cather 1990: 419).Paths which connect both to other places and other people reinforce the idea ofmovement, of changing attitudes, and evolving views, all of them vital elementsin the definition both of Southwestern geography – by then, ‘the country wasstill waiting to be made into a landscape’ (Cather 1990: 334), and Latourhimself. In his ramblings he was always looking for movement, even in the sky:“Coming along the Santa Fé trail, in the vast plain of Kansas, Father Latour hadfound the sky more a desert than the land; a hard, empty blue, very monotonousto the eyes of a Frenchman. But west of the Pecos all that changed; here therewas always activity overhead, clouds forming and moving all day long”(ibidem). The atmospheric qualities making more visible and intense Latour’sown search for transcendence: “whether they were dark and full of violence, orsoft and white with luxurious idleness, they powerfully affected the world