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again . Columbus and his men have traveled thousands of miles, but
for all intents and purposes they are still in Spain.
The inhibiting effect of acclimation upon one's perceptual
powers is traced in an observation Jefferson records in the
Notes:
A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly.
Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within
the memory even of the middle-aged . Snows are less frequent
and less deep . They do not often lie, below the mountains, more
than one, two, or three days , and very rarely a week. They are
remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long
continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered
with snow about three months in every year. The rivers , which
then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter,
scarcely ever do so now.
Though this is of course meant to be taken strictly as an empirical
account of climatic change on the new continent, it can be viewed as
a moving parable which traces the domestication of this New World
within the memory of those yet living. In this sense, the struggle is
not to survive but to keep the memory of a strange and once won–
drous world alive ; to resist adaptation to what was then forbidding ,
but thrilling; to what was then truly
new.
We shall delineate with correctness the great arteries of this great
country : those who come after us will extend the ramifications as
they become acquainted with them, and fill up the canvas we
begin .
- Thomas Jefferson
That Jefferson should liken his yet-unexplored country to a
"canvas," a kind of huge sketch that subsequent generations were to
flesh out with fact , provides yet further proof of his prescience; for
this is an early delineation of what might be termed the two poles of
the American imagination. "A fact is true poetry": this was how
Ralph Waldo Emerson was to put it in 1841. Fact, poetry, the coun–
try as canvas : a willful mix of science and art , practicalityembold–
ened by, infused with , vision , and the country itself the ground upon
which these powers are to be invoked and applied. In varying de–
grees these impulses can be found in
~
number of notable Ameri–
cans . The nineteenth-century landscapist and portrait painter
Samuel Morse, who tinkered with electronics as an avocation, de-
