America [antikvár]

AMERICAN PATCHWORKhere is no unity in the American landscape. The country is diverse and patchwork, like its immigration. America is an ingathering of mountain and desert and swamp and north woods and great plain.Too much of the country now looks like the outskirts of Albuquerquebright commercial highway strips of fast-food franchises and gas stations. They are loud and transient and depressingdepressing not because they are vulgar but because one feels their impermanence, their lack of connection.Still, America has a thousand styles of landscape that cannot be ruined, or not for a long time. The American sense of place remains intact. America is an event of astonishing physical variety, and energy.1 find many American landscapes haunting in a way that puzzles me. The country is deeply resonant and full of histories. Yet, the human scratches upon the surface of the land have been so shallow, so passing. As one flies over America, one is amazed by how much of it is empty, unused.My own taste in American landscape is eccentric. 1 love Kansas for reasons mystic and sentimental. The American prairie has an austere emptiness with subtleties of spiritual meaning not to be achieved in, say, the ecstatic Ektachromes of Hawaii. Northern Alabama is rough, lovely territorysmall mountains and lakes as clear as the local moonshine they call Cat, for wildcat whiskey. The Big Bend country of Texas is a magic realm through which my great grandfather, a colonel of the Ninth Cavalry, chased a Mescalero Apache renegade named Victorio for many weeks more than a hundred years ago. Colonel Morrow lost Victorio there among the Mountains of the Moon. 1 love the upper peninsula of Michigan, the Florida Keys and the sweet rectilinear farmland of Indiana.New York City, where I live, is a form of antinature. It exaggerates one side of the American impulse. The city looks sometimes as if nature hadNew York's 42nd Street has a pulse of nervous energy and a shimmer of the illicit.9