Inscriptions of the Land : An Historical Sketch of American Nature Writing

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Some years ago, while attending a welcoming party for foreign students at the University of Virginia, a Japanese woman told me how much she admired America. She described how she had just returned from a fabulous plane trip, her small chartered Cessna having glided through the Grand Canyon. "America has such wide nature!" This somewhat bizarre way of putting it struck me at first as a misuse of an adjecdve; but then I mused. Wide? Can nature be measured? Is it quantifiable? The giant Sequoia trees of northern California are certainly wide, and the Mississippi River, the nation's longest, can be as wide as a mile across in some places. But nature itself? Someone else might just as Well call it long, I thought, or even heavy. (And what would be the　opposite: Can nature be narrow?!)But I thought about the variety of natural settings and landscapes found in America, the many wide rivers, the thousands of square miles of desert in the Southwest, and the huge swamps of the Southeast, the rolling prairies of the Midwest, and the great mountain ranges, and I thought after all that her term 'wide' was rather apt indeed, as it suggests expansive, and I would be the first to describe nature as expansive entity, with its wide range of variety. I should have got over my fussiness and looked at the poetic truth of what she said; I would reply to her now: "Yes, mture is the widest thing we have in America."

本稿は、『岩手大学英語教育論集』（ 第10号, 2008年3月, pp.116-130）に掲載論文と同一である。

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