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junction, as he speaks of the differing contingencies to which men
are subject by virtue simply of the accidents of place :
Our extremes of heat and cold, of 6° and 98° , were indeed very
distressing to us, and were thought to put the extent of the
human constitution to considerable trial. Yet a Siberian would
have considered them as scarcely a sensible variation.
It is not, then, simply a matter of vocabularies that prove incom–
mensurable; it is the very geography of experience itself that stamps
and constricts the imagination. The Siberian's view ofthe world is of
no matter to Jefferson's Virginian , for whom "the extent of the
human constitution" is charted in accordance with parameters al–
ready in place at birth.
My imagination, it would seem, has its own
geography:
viewed in this light, Tobey's remark can
be
seen as cau–
tionary ; an intimation of the limits and boundaries of consciousness
of which we are scarcely sensible.
That consciousness should have such coordinates, that the
range of our receptivity to new experience should be so swiftly con–
stricted, is perhaps the rudest awakening the New World offers those
who choose to explore it. (As the painter Clyford Still remarked, "To
be stopped by a frame's edge was intolerable; a Euclidean prison.")
Though it may be hard to go home again, as the old American adage
has it, it is yet more difficult ever truly to leave, as is apparent in the
earliest accounts of New World exploration. Christopher Columbus,
writing his
Letter Describing the First Voyage
in 1493 , observed of the
native inhabitants of Hispaniola:
. . . they are immediately content with any small thing, valuable
or valueless, that is given them. I forbade the men to give them
bits of broken crockery, fragments of glass or tags oflace, though
if they could get them they fancied them the finest jewels in the
world . . . they even took bits of broken hoops from the wine
barrels and, as simple as animals, gave what they had. This
seemed to me to be wrong and I forbade it.
Aside from its intimations of exploitation, the passage is striking for
its blithe assumption that European standards of utility and value
are universal; that these indigenous peoples have only a cultural
tabula rasa
upon which the Old World can, and must, be writ once
