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Anthony DePalma is a New York Times correspondent and author of Here: A Biography of the New American Continent (2001).
We can only imagine how the hearts of the early Spanish explorers raced and their imaginations ran wild as they first set foot on the mainland of North America in the early sixteenth century. The Taino Indians of Cuba were their only source of information when they raised the flag of their king at this mysterious place. They said there was a great and bountiful land nearby, and this news bolstered the Spaniards’ own belief that they could reach the forbidden shores of India—or even China—for which they had been searching when they set out from Spain.
We can imagine the keen disappointment the conquistadors felt as time after time they realized that they still were far from their intended destination. No matter what the opportunities and wonders presented by the new world they stumbled upon—and there were many—their misunderstandings about where they were continued to color their discoveries with misdirected regret. Their initial misinterpretations had a legacy of their own. For decades to come European maps of the mysterious continent badly miscalculated distances and misjudged the relationship of one land mass to another. Great portions of the maps were simply left blank, or were filled in with inland seas, gigantic offshore islands, and other fanciful features based more on imagination than fact. On a few of those inchoate maps North America was simply called America Septentrional, an ancient Latin word referring to the seven stars of the Great Bear constellation, otherwise known as the Big Dipper, which mariners used to find the North star that guided them across treacherous seas. Thus, for a time, the entire continent—or at least the part of it that was known—was nothing more than a signpost.
At first the Western world had little understanding or appreciation of what had been discovered across the sea. For at least fifty years after Columbus’s first voyage, North America was seen as an obstacle in the path to Asia. To the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the first wave of determined navigators who came after him, the undreamed-of continent was a wild place to be circumvented on the way toward a more practical destination. Even when fragmentary reports of the continent’s true breadth conflicted with earlier beliefs, myths were sustained. Well into the sixteenth century, European cartographers drew maps with India attached to Mexico. And California often was portrayed as an island for a century beyond that.
This continental confusion only marked the beginning of what would become a long history of misconceptions about North America, some of them persisting until today. In large measure this is due to the evanescent nature of the continent. Verbalize Europe, and an idea comes to mind, a vision broad enough to encompass different languages and unique cultures, all connected by geography and history. Africa evokes a similar reaction. So too Asia, and even South America, with a history no longer than North America.
North America, as a notion, does not convey a single, strong image. We understand it is there, we know North America is a continent based on scientific knowledge grounded in the observation and measurement of half a millennium. We know the boundaries of America Septentrional. But the way we have known it would, in Spanish, be defined by the verb saber, which refers to book learning or observation, and not conocer, which is said of those things we know intimately, as we know a friend or a special place like home. We know North America exists, but we do not know North America’s.
One reason for such enduring misinterpretations is that North America is a concept beyond geography. For purposes of maps, the designation “North America” includes Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean. But should Jamaicans be considered North Americans? Should Tegucigalpa be counted among North American capitals? And what about Mexico? The answers lie beyond geography and today really are left to political scientists, diplomats, traders, and economists more than to cartographers.
But even in these contemporary terms there is confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to defining North America. For generations Mexico has firmly found its place in the world as a leading member of the community known as Latin America. Joined by a shared language and culture to Central and South America, Mexico had always looked south for identity. But for the last decade an enormous change has swept over the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country. Most dramatically, the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its implementation in 1994 readjusted Mexico’s internal compass. NAFTA brought promise and problems across the breadth of North America. Jobs were lost but jobs were gained, and the economies of all three countries were obliged to adjust to the new reality. Now, with 90 percent of its exports shipped across the Rio Grande to the United States, and its economy thoroughly integrated into the booms and bust cycles of the United States’ economy, Mexico has taken a long stride towards joining the north.
With the historic elections of July 2000, Mexico embraced fully the North American traditions of democracy and free elections and gave Vicente Fox an opportunity to put forward a new vision of Mexico’s place in the world. “First and foremost,” he said, “that vision is founded on a new partnership with the United States and Canada that builds on existing institutions and creates the foundation for a shared North American area of peace and prosperity.” President Fox set out almost immediately to make clear that the new Mexico he would rule would be a full and complete member of the North American community. At a news conference in Washington in August 2000, the president-elect boldly proclaimed Mexico’s new relationship with North America, somewhat to the dismay of Mexico’s compañeros in Latin America. “There is no doubt that NAFTA is not only a commitment for us, it is a partnership,” Fox said. He was equally blunt about the new reality of North America. The United States and Canada need Mexican labor, he said, and Mexicans need more economic opportunity than Mexico can provide. The nations of North America weren’t just neighbors anymore, Fox said, they were part of a reluctant trinity. And unless Mexico prospered, the rest of the continent would be hard pressed to prosper.
Fox was also intimating that there may be a North American set of values that exists, though obscured by political short-sightedness and cultural myopia. Yet giving full expression to those shared values could have consequences of its own. Fox’s new vision of Mexico in the world included a Mexico far more willing to act in the international arena, a break with the tradition of non-intervention that Mexico has adhered to since World War II. This is most clearly seen by Mexico’s recent campaign to win a seat on the UN Security Council. In the past, Mexico has studiously avoided such sharply political positions, fully understanding that in most circumstances, voting on security council matters would inevitably put Mexico into difficult positions vis-à-vis its most important international relationship—that with the United States. Indeed, for Mexico, voting on the council was drawn in stark terms of either submission to the will of the United States, or collision with the goals of the United States. Either way, Mexico would lose.
For Canada, the new vision of the world expressed by the emerging integration of North America also presents certain problems. At the outset, Canada figured that Mexico’s entrance into NAFTA would help the two smaller countries together offset some of the overwhelming weight of the United States in the continental equilibrium. But making that position work in the context of economic, political, and strategic terms hasn’t been easy, and many Canadians, including former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, have openly asked whether Canada has not given up too much in exchange for too little in the rush to integration. “We have enjoyed a special relationship with the United States but we no longer have it,” Axworthy remarked at a conference in Ottawa in late 2000. “It’s gone.”
Mexico’s growing economic might worries Canada, which has had the luxury of both criticizing America and exploiting its position as America’s number one trading partner. But the future is unsettling. Canada’s share of American imports has held steady at about 20 percent for the last decade. But during that same time, Mexican exports to the U.S. doubled. They now make up about 10 percent of U.S. imports. Given the high level of foreign investment in Mexico and the country’s frenzied pace of development, Mexico has a good chance of growing to become the United States’ leading trade partner, displacing Canada by the end of this decade. Canadians know this, and they don’t like it.
Of course, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, the relationship of the three nations of North America has taken on new importance. Suddenly, the prospect of closer integration is not being driven by economic fears but security concerns of the most desperate type. The need for enhanced border vigilance and homeland security have forced all three to think of North America as a continental settlement of shared interests, compelling them to overlook their differences. In a way this is the reverse of what has been the history of North America for so long, where for political concerns the tendency was to overlook shared interests and to focus instead on differences. Continuing that routine in today’s world would be a dangerous proposition.
September 11, 2001, caused North American priorities to literally flip over. Whereas before then it was the southern border with Mexico that was long the major concern of security and law enforcement, afterwards the border with Mexico became the quiet frontier. Now it is the border with Canada that stirs up fear in Americans that terrorists could sneak across any of the thousands of unguarded areas of the border and pursue their vicious plots.
The borders into and out of the United States were not closed officially after the attacks, but the economic cost of temporarily slowing down the free flow of goods across those lines became painfully evident. The 9/11/01 hijackers accomplished what no army would have ever presumed to think it could achieve—the successful blockade of the largest economy in the world. Today, officials of all three countries have been forced to continually calculate the cost of keeping those borders open and operating smoothly, while also screening out potential terrorists and the materials those terrorists would use to harm Americans. The task, simply put, is enormous.
In the last full year before the attacks, 489 million people passed through inspection systems at American borders. In essence that means that the entire population of North America and then some had rearranged itself during the year. Since 9/11/01, each one of those people has had to be considered a potential terrorist. At the same time, those 489 million travelers traveled in 127 million passenger vehicles, each one a potential hiding place for the kinds of explosives Ahmed Ressam hid inside his trunk as he crossed from British Columbia to Washington State on his mission to bomb Los Angeles airport as the United States celebrated the millennium. A wary U.S. customs agent who asked questions saved the day. But if the thought of Ressam packing enough explosive material in the wheel well of his Toyota to demolish an airport terminal is frightening, consider the 11.6 million sealed containers that are brought into the United States each year from ports around the world. And the 11.5 million trucks, 2.2 million railroad cars, 829,000 airplanes, and 211,000 ocean-going vessels, each one of them capable of transporting a terrorist’s handiwork.
The cost to the Bush administration of the additional security measures now being undertaken is estimated to be about $43 billion for 2002–03. Because President Fox has had such difficulty working with the Mexican Congress since his inauguration, his 2002–03 budget contains little new spending for counter terrorism measures. Most Mexicans feel they live with the terror of criminals on their streets every day.
Canada’s 2002 budget included almost US$5 billion over five years in additional funds for enhancing border security and upgrading Canada’s depleted military strength. Canadian Customs has doubled the number of x-ray systems, ion mobility spectrometers, and other equipment used to detect contraband inside containers and trailer trucks. The NEXUS program for prescreening low-risk frequent travelers is being phased in at all major border crossings. In March 2002, joint teams of American and Canadian customs officials started their coordinated duties at Port Newark and the port facilities in Vancouver, Montreal, Halifax, and Seattle to target containers destined for either country at their first port of entry, rather than at their final destination. And anyone flying into or out of a Canadian airport will have to pay an additional $24 Canadian (about US$14 depending on the exchange rate) that will be added to the price of a ticket to cover the cost of new security measures like explosives, detection equipment, and the placement of Mountie marshals on random flights.
Before 9/11/01, the major thrust of North American integration was development of a continental energy policy and a coordinated and mutually beneficial immigration blueprint. Today, those ideas remain valid, but they have been pushed to a back burner by the development of a continental defense system and cross-border security. That has raised some conflicts as different interpretations of the border come forward. For the United States now, security is the paramount concern. That is less so for Canada and Mexico. Those countries, while concerned about the same issues of security and counterterrorism, continue to see the borders as primarily commercial gateways. Their principal concern is ensuring that the vital flow of goods across their frontiers continues unhindered. Invariably, these goals will come into conflict with each other, forcing Americans to weigh individual priorities against a broader sense of continental ambitions. Once again, there will be dissonance and disagreement.
Many values are not common to the three American nations. But there once was a time when we were not so unlike each other. In high energy particle physics there is a concept known as broken symmetry, which is useful to understanding the development of the American continent. At the start of the known universe, in the very first instant after the Big Bang fireball, everything existed in a state of perfect symmetry. All matter looked alike and behaved the same way. But as time went on, the raw material of the universe cooled and began to collect in different ways and with a great diversity of natural properties. The unifying symmetry that had briefly existed was lost. A similar sequence of events took place here. The landing by Columbus was the “big bang” that changed, instantaneously, the known world. At first, America was perceived as everything that Europe was not. But then the voyages of Jacques Cartier, John Cabot, as well as the other explorers and all the settlers who followed them, brought a range of horizons into view. And the symmetry of America was finally broken when the Europeans, applying their own beliefs, attempted to change the nature of the continent. For five centuries, that process continued. Then, rather unexpectedly, steps were taken in the 1990s to begin the re-integration of the three nations of North America. And with it came an unprecedented wave of opportunity that washed across the continent. This changed the way we work in, live on, and think about the American continent. It also brought us into more frequent conflicts, the inevitable consequence of our intensified closeness. But taken as a whole, the events of the last decade, and in a particular way since 9/11/01, have begun to restore some of the symmetry that was broken half a millennium ago. What we are seeing take place is that our most substantial differences—those based on the quality of the opportunity for transformation that living in North America provides—are leveling off.
But the power and importance of these changes do not, by themselves, ensure that we will be aware of them. Like one of Mexico’s fearsome earthquakes that have their epicenters far from the point at which they are felt most intensely, the forces shaping North America today gather strength largely out of our sight.
Much separates those of us in the United States from our North American neighbors—sometimes culture and language, and almost always world view—but there is one idea that has been most central to forming the characters of all three nations. It is the most fundamental of North American traits: the desire to get ahead. It is only in the kind of opportunities for doing so that these three nations have differed for so long. I have met many successful people in Canada, the sons and daughters of immigrants from all over the world. But with few exceptions Canada—despite its similarities to the United States—has offered immigrants nowhere near the bounty of opportunities they would have had in America. True to its British roots, Canada still puts great stock in having the proper training and the right connections, a club mentality that imposes rigid expectations of behavior and outcome. William Thorsell, long-time editor of Globe and Mail in Toronto, made it seem that background, and not merit, were what really mattered in Canada. “In New York they ask what you earn,” he once wrote in an editorial page column in the Globe, but in Toronto, “they ask where you live.” 1 Canada’s generic universities are not expected to transform students, but to turn out graduates who are better-paid versions of their parents. Since the end of World War II, more than 60 percent of top Canadian executives have come from upper-class backgrounds, almost twice as high a percentage as among American executives. Although a similar figure is not available for Mexico, the fact that a handful of families control the country’s largest corporations makes clear that economic opportunity there is largely reserved for those who already have status and power.
For all their proximities, Mexico and Canada remain relatively unknown places to many Americans. When the Times first sent me to Mexico in 1993, and then to Canada in 1996, my understanding of our neighbors was perhaps typical. That is, I had been across both borders and I thought I knew all I needed to know about the nations that begin where America ends. During a trip across the United States in 1974, we stopped in El Paso and walked across the bridge to Ciudad Juárez, before that city had sunk completely into a hellhole of drugs and violence. I was 22 then, and I savored the day, poking my head into side streets and around strange corners. I haggled over the price of a striped blanket, certain I was being cheated, and ate in a cheap restaurant where I tasted the fire of Mexican chilies for the first time. As an expedition to a foreign country, it wasn’t much, but it was enough to allow me, like many other Americans, to say that I knew something about Mexico.
On another voyage across the continent a year later, with a new wife and a small dog, I drove west as far as our Volkswagen could carry us. When the wobbly VW met its match in the Rockies, we turned north into Canada and headed back east from there. We drove, often in stunned silence, across the empty expanses of a country far larger than we had ever imagined, a vast stretch of wilderness on our borders that reminded us of how recently it was that we all had arrived. The roads and cars and even the faces of the people we met seemed familiar enough. But every place name was new, the money was strangely colorful, and the gasoline was then priced indecipherably in imperial gallons, all making us feel out of sync with our surroundings. About Canada itself we knew almost as little as Mikhail Baryshnikov who, less than a year before, had defected in Toronto. “What did I know about Canada?” he wrote on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his fateful decision. “I have to be honest. I knew precisely three things: Canada had great hockey teams, it grew a lot of wheat because the bread we ate every winter was thanks to Canadian wheat, and Canada was where Glenn Gould lived and worked.” 2
There was one part of Canada I felt I did know well, and it influenced my sentiments about the whole country, and about North America. It was a small village on the banks of the St. Lawrence River that I had visited as a child. Every summer the family next door made the trip north, to the province of Quebec. One year we joined them. It took an entire day in my father's black Buick to get to the village of Beaupré. There, beside the river, inside an enormous gray basilica dedicated to St. Anne, my neighbor Nicky pointed to a spot high up on one of the huge columns at the church’s entrance. There hung the brace that he had strapped on every day after polio had sapped the strength from his legs. Doctors had told his parents he would never walk without it. His family took him to Canada seeking a miracle. They felt they had found one in Beaupré, and the tangle of leather and steel on the church column, the desperate materials of dreams and hopes that encircled it like some terrible ivy, was the proof.
Nicky lived next door to me but he was far more than just a neighbor. In later years it became clear that his illness had lent a shape to my life as strongly as it had to his. Our closeness meant I agreed to live within a world defined by his wheelchair and brace, while he tried to ride piggyback on my own experience of the world. Often it was a compromise. We played baseball, but using the cards of a board game. I’d bounce pink spaldeens off the wall of the sweater factory across the street with a high enough arc to give him time to move his wheelchair to catch them. We spent a lot of time just talking, and we satisfied our curiosity with books that could transport us in ways that Nicky’s wrecked legs could not. It was not at all a typical childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the son of a longshoreman might have expected to go on and become a policeman or a longshoreman, someone who worked with his hands, not someone who made his living with words. It was not what Nicky and I had looked for. We lived the way we did simply because we had been thrown together by fate. Living side by side, whether we wanted to or not, had influenced the choices we made and the things that we did. Being near each other made us more like each other.
Resemblances were all I expected to find in Canada, but once there I detected differences in some of our most basic beliefs. Some were pleasant surprises: the strong sense of public concern in Canadian life meant that I never saw a subway car, vending machine, or public phone in Toronto that had been vandalized. Some differences were just unexpected for example the Catholic schools in Ontario were publicly supported and mail wasn’t delivered on Saturday. And some differences were downright disconcerting: I had to worry about publication bans, closed-door meetings, and sky-high taxes to support a social safety network in which a hypochondriac could see five doctors in one day for a runny nose but somebody needing a heart bypass had to wait five months for the operation.
In a similar way, when I arrived in Mexico I looked for signs of how much living by our sides had made our neighbors come to be like us. Again I was surprised. A Mexican taxi driver once remarked that Americans live in a fantasy land because they foolishly expect lines to be straight and laws to be obeyed, including traffic lights and stop signs. It didn’t take long after moving to Mexico to discover the fickle nature of the country. Like the great gray Metropolitan Cathedral in the heart of Mexico City that is sinking unevenly into the mud and occasionally has to be jacked up to keep from collapsing, Mexico seems to be forever making adjustments to keep itself upright or on course.
A similar process of discovery, settlement, development, and eventually separation from the European powers has shaped the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The places from which most North Americans initially came—Spain, France, and England—shared many of the fundamentals of a Western culture that was well defined and firmly established by the time the first explorers arrived. The American continent was built on the dreams and nightmares of the millions of immigrants and slaves who followed Columbus, and of the descendants of the 10 million Native Americans who lived here before Europeans arrived. Our differences stem from the cultures all those wayfarers brought with them and the turns that we have taken through time. Thereafter, Mexico, Canada, and the United States have been interlinked through their history, forming a reluctant continental trinity, united and divided by a shared history. The factors that contributed to the dissimilarities are as numerous as the misconceptions the three nations have imposed on each other. The first modern nation is what Mexican poet Octavio Paz believed the thirteen rebellious colonies managed to create, a state founded not on geography or language but on a powerful notion about individual rights and freedom that has provided an example for the world. But Paz also recognized contradictions and flaws that made America the seat of “a peculiar empire,” one that struggles to reconcile its role as a democracy with that of conqueror, which is the way Mexicans still see us because of the Mexican-American War and the peace treaty that mutilated their country and took away the richest parts. 3
The Canadians wrestle with the uncomfortable circumstances of what came to be their country, formed not in the crucible of revolution but in the fine print of contract and legal arrangement. It has always seemed an incomplete genesis, which has left them struggling to define what Canada is and wondering what might have been had their ancestors not backed the losing side in the struggle between Britain and the colonies for control of a large part of North America. “We are a nation of losers,” the Canadian historian Desmond Morton has said. 4 “After all, losers have to go somewhere and that’s not a bad thing. They’ve been through a highly educational experience and they bring rather more tolerance than people who believe they’re winners.” Defeat became one of the many layers in Canada’s character. Like Russian nesting dolls, inside the defeat of the British in the American Revolution is found the defeat of the French by the British in the Seven Years War. And inside that, the defeat of the Huron and other native tribes by the muskets of French settlers and the diseases that Jesuit missionaries carried with them across the ocean.
Defeat may have bred more tolerance in the Canadian character than did victory for America’s, but the decision to remain loyal to the British crown rather than join the rebels of the thirteen colonies in some ways still defines Canada. Canadian eyes are constantly on the United States. They can’t help it. Over 80 percent of them live in a narrow band of fecund earth and moderating temperatures that extends to just 100 miles from the U.S. border so that it seems they have all just arrived from, or are about to depart for, America. If Mexico had been settled in the same manner, there might now be some 90 million Mexicans living within 100 miles of the United States’ border, and that frontier would hardly have been left undefended for long.
Mexico’s concept of freedom does not match Americans’, and Canadians put their own coloring on the distinction between individual choice and the common good. Today, similar events are seen in each country through a different lens—the fear of conquest is central to both countries but in different ways; manifest in the tremors caused in each country by NAFTA.
For most of our common history these three countries have remained cocooned in their own lands, despite the proximities, and solitude has historically been an overarching theme of all. Canadian writers often used “The Two Solitudes,” the title of a novel by the Canadian author Hugh MacLennan, as a shorthand way of describing the schizophrenia of their nation. Octavio Paz called his meditation on his homeland “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” And in the United States, we know so little about our own neighbors that we brag about it, wearing it as a sign of our own independence and haughty power. That is our solitude.
In the United States, most Americans are rarely conscious that they share this continent with anyone. Only about 5 percent of Americans live close enough to the Canadian border to pick up Canadian radio or television broadcasts, and an equally small percentage of the total population live within close enough range of the Mexican border to experience the intense and sustained contact with foreign cultures that can cause national loyalties to blur.
Just three nations occupying a vast continent, the people of North America created in the new world a solitary realm where, against all logic, our closeness served to keep us distant from each other. This was not an affliction only of Americans, nor was it just a symptom of the distant past. When Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister of Canada he tried to salve his country’s wounded psyche in part by turning against its biggest ally. His government passed laws restricting the right of foreigners, mostly Americans, to invest in Canadian businesses, and he tried to hoard Canadian energy for Canada. “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” a pugnacious Trudeau said in a speech at the National Press Building in Washington in 1969. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” When Carlos Salinas de Gortari was elected president of Mexico in 1988, he expressed the same need for distance. He held out no hope that Mexico would ever drop its nationalistic defenses and join forces with its great oppressor, the United States, in a trade agreement. “I am not in favor of such a proposal,” Salinas told the Times’ Larry Rohter a few weeks before taking office. “There is such a different economic level between the United States and Mexico that I don’t believe such a common market would provide an advantage to either country.”
In the early 1990s, a monumental transformation got under way. The causes were varied but powerful enough to sweep away the prejudices of several centuries, and the transition was difficult. This embarkation forced Mexico through some of the most turbulent and telling moments in the ancient country’s maze of history, a period marked by brutality, violence, and a glimmer of real democratic transition that at several points almost seemed to flicker out but just barely stayed lit and led, in a surprisingly brief time after those events, to what amounted to a revolution and Mexico’s first peaceful transfer of power. As that process was playing out south of the U.S. border, on the north Canada was engaging in one of the most remarkable exercises in the history of democracy: Canada’s attempt to rebuild its economy by drawing closer to the United States aroused separatists who threatened to tear Canada apart from within by fomenting independence for the province. The country was consumed with nothing less that a debate over its own right to exist.
For most of my life I have seen the United States the way it tends to be presented in weather maps or academic illustrations—a free-floating, easily recognizable, well-defined shape with blank space to the north and south, a single block lifted out of a 3-D puzzle. More recently I came to see it the way satellite photos portray North America from the edge of space, stripped of political divisions that form three nations divided by two borders within one continent. These three neighbors had had far more to do with each other than simply existing side by side, something I think was able to recognize more quickly than others because of my own personal experiences. Living next door to Nicky and his wheelchair when we were youths had influenced us in ways that only became clear long afterwards.
The United States, Mexico, and Canada also grew up together. They are three trees whose roots are growing more tangled, even as the trees themselves retain their own shape and stock. Despite America’s dominance, what they are moving toward is clearly not going to be just a more elaborate version of the United States. Our closest neighbors are picking through our closets, taking what they like while hoping to leave the soiled jackets and torn slacks behind. Through these two neighbors and allies, the United States is shaping its own relationship with the rest of the world, a world in which we increasingly must deal with nations that seek to be like us, while resenting our influence and power. For this reason, Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican writer, has called North America the “testing ground of the 21st Century.”
The reasons that North America matters are evident every day, if we choose to see them. The drug trade, international trade, immigration, cultural exchange, mass communications, shared defense–all are linkages across our borders that are leading inevitably toward greater integration of North America. The continent will eventually become something less than a European Union but more than the three nations with two borders on one continent that has existed until recently.
As should be clear by now, misunderstanding has been as common in North American history as have been immigrants and wars. We are attempting these days to see through the haze of ignorance and distortion that has historically clung to the continent. Like the Spanish explorers, who could get nowhere until they understood what they had found, we must challenge our long-held notions of what we thought we knew. We must rethink the place where we live and revise the place we occupy in a world whose map is never more than temporarily complete.
1 The Globe and Mail, July 19, 1997.
2 Mikhail Baryshnikov, “My Leap of Faith,” National Post, June 5, 1999.
3 Octavio Paz, Tiempo Nublado (Mexico City: Editorial Seix Barral, 1983), p. 43.
4 Quoted in The Ottawa Citizen, May 31, 1998.
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