Stimulated by Peter Sloterdijk’s recent thinking of a human immersion within atmospheres which make experience possible and by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s method of reading for atmosphere, this paper seeks to read certain passages from Henry James’ collection of travel writings The American Scene with attention to an evocation of atmosphere, both within the text and within the reader’s own experience. By accompanying these readings with some of James’ own programmatic statements on the possibilities of artistic fiction in his essay “The Art of Fiction”, this paper hopes to suggest an affinity between James’ view of experience and recent thinking which concerns itself with our human immersion within atmosphere. Throughout The American Scene references to a physical atmosphere, the weather conditions that surround experience, often signal a breakdown in a controlling hypotactic syntax. This reading will suggest that the textual atmosphere which results from this breakdown emerges as an alternative to a unified subjective voice behind the text which guarantees its meaning. In these moments, the text seeks to create “breathing-spaces” between reader and text. Rather than decodable intentional structures of meaning, the text encourages the kind of interferences, contaminations, and confusions which constitute the atmospheric, as was being discovered by the meteorological sciences at the time of James’ writing. Literary texts that are able to produce these “breathing-spaces” between reader and text shift our attitude from one of hermeneutic decoding to one of patient attunement to the atmosphere in which experience is possible. Rather than reading a world of signs that denote various substances or properties of these substances, reading for atmosphere may grant us access to alternative perspectives and possibilities of action in the context of our contemporary planetary changes whose immensity and complexity seem to go beyond the scope of our present human subjective forms of sensibility.