Borges, following Valéry and Emerson, once said that literature is an infinite tapestry in which every author rewrites what has already been thought, where every verse beats within a prior verse, and where the new is nothing but the echo of the eternal. Coleridge’s flower—that vision of a man who awakens holding a blossom from Paradise—is the symbol that the essential always returns, that invention is not the property of an individual but a universal inheritance.
Nature works according to the same logic. Not long ago, in my Colorado garden, three American robins were born. To narrate them, I gave them names: Ricardo, Renata, and Raquel. They took flight, migrated, and returned, fulfilling their cycle, repeating the millennial dance of life. Later their offspring will come, and the offspring of their offspring, and if I erase the names, what remains is the same as always: the marvel of reproduction, the continuity of life, the perpetuity of a red-breasted song over the grass. A future inhabited by other observers, in other homes, who will see the same and believe, as I did, that it is an unrepeatable miracle. But nature had already written it.
Whitman intuited something similar in Leaves of Grass: that the poet does not invent life but celebrates it and sings it as part of an endless chorus. Emerson, in his essays, affirmed that each poem is merely a variation of a single universal poem. Borges said it of the classics: every writer inherits and repeats, with variations, the central core that does not change. Literature, like nature, is repetition with nuances. And this repetition does not make it less miraculous—it makes it more admirable.
I extend this logic to the idea of the United States. This nation is not merely a territory or a flag, but an idea. An idea that has always been there and will always return, like the robins in spring, like the verses that resound across the centuries. It does not depend on one man, or one government, or one particular time; it depends on someone, in every generation, teaching it, spreading it, loving it.
The data confirms this transformation. Today, immigrants and their children account for nearly 28 percent of the U.S. population—more than 93 million people. One in every four children—around 18 million—lives with at least one immigrant parent. And according to the latest census, half of the nation’s children are no longer identified as white but as members of diverse ethnic groups. America, then, has ceased to be homogeneous in skin; what sustains it is not the uniformity of color but the continuity of the idea.
Recently, I watched a film called Warfare. In it, a group of Marines is ambushed. We know how the story of a battle unfolds: death lurks, danger surrounds, and each life depends on the other. What struck me was not the firepower but the diversity of names and faces: Latino, Jewish, Black, Anglo. On the battlefield, such diversity is invisible, because everyone knows there is only one way to survive: to love the whole as oneself. The higher goal is not individual glory but keeping the greatest number alive.
So it is with the nation. What weakens it is not that its skin has ceased to be white, but that some have ceased to think as a country. The true problem is not racial—it is a problem of ethos, of thought, of identity. The challenge is to recover the founding ideas—liberty, equality of opportunity, the dignity of work—and to unite them with the progressive ideas that have kept the nation great through time. The United States has never ceased to be great; what has diminished is the strength of its collective thought, that which sustained E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one.
We must therefore be teachers like nature, which gives us robins to observe eternally. We must be writers like the classics, who recognized that their work was only a chapter in a greater poem. And we must be humble enough to accept that it was never about us, but about the idea that transcends us: the idea of a universal good for the greatest number, the idea of America.
For what Coleridge saw in his dream, what Borges deciphered in his pages, what Whitman sang in his verses, and what I saw in my garden is the same: that all that is true returns, that the essential repeats itself, that the eternal does not die.
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