In his classic novel, The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper has his hero, a land developer, take his cousin on a tour of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, rows of houses, a bustling metropolis. But his cousin looks around bewildered. All she sees is a forest. "Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show me" she asks. He’s astonished she can t see them. Where. Why everywhere, he replies. For though they are not yet built on earth, he has built them in his mind, and they are as concrete to him as if they were already constructed and finished. Cooper was illustrating a distinctly American trait, future-mindedness: the ability to see the present from the vantage point of the future; the freedom to feel unencumbered by the past and more emotionally attached to things to come. As Albert Einstein once said, "Life for the American is always becoming, never being.\