Revista de Letras - Utad

Clouds, streams and paths… 163beneath them. The desert, the mountains and mesas were continually re-formedand re-coloured by cloud shadows. The whole country seems fluid to the eyeunder this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light”(Cather 1990: 340). Parallel to what Frederick Church was doing in painting,Cather joins American artists for whom the sky is pictured as the vessel of thespirit (Novak 1995: 98) 3 . Her character’s depiction results from an awareness ofthe height and breadth of the sky and the force of the wind, for she, likeAmerican painters of the time, was particularly interested in the mutation ofclouds for in it she saw the possibility of grasping the ephemeral, a process muchin the vein of Emerson and his own idea of the necessity to stop the changingmoment, to make of it a single moment of ‘concentrated eternity’ (Novak 1995:93). It happens, of course, that Impressionism has moved the meaning of lightwell beyond old frontiers: impressionism brought a new perception ofatmosphere and space; light on adobe walls, to use a Cather expression, reveals afragment of space in detail, highlighting the meaning either of common objectsor natural particulars. According to Cather, observations of nature areinseparable from observations of human lives, bringing forth the intimacy of thegeography of earth to the geography of mind, proving that to write about natureis not simply to observe nature, but also to know to situate the self within andoutside the environs of the natural world.John Steinbeck is also one of the authors I have considered to highlighthere. He, in the vein of Thoreau, also compels his reader to look attentively atthe natural world. Steinbeck also wants the reader to question the values thatsociety stands for, and is therefore concerned with the biological and thespiritual fate of the communities he describes. In The Grapes of Wrath (1939),for instance, he creates characters whose knowledge of the land is precise, andgeography a shaping force throughout the novel. To walk becomes a destiny andbecause California is no Paradise, the Joad family has to keep walking, alwayson the move like the turtle Tom finds at the beginning of the novel. There is noplace to call home, but travelling either on foot or by car has given the charactersthe possibility of changing their own selves; as Tom says at the end: “I knownow a fella ain’t no good alone” (Steinbeck 1987: 462). In this novel nature isdevastated, the dry landscape an analogy of the individual self that has beenruling the American economy. Furthermore water, either in the form of rain orthe Colorado river, is to represent the reaching of a more solipsistic self. Aftersome troubles, the Joads arrive at the river setting up their tent, the place that3 According to Novak’s view, America is a country which belongs to a tradition singularly devotedto the concept of light as spirit, and therefore, the sky is pictured as the vessel of spirit (1995: 98).