author, willa cather is not an unknown quantity to me - by reputation - but i had never read any of her writing until by chance i recently stumbled across one of her books available through the wonderful people at project gutenberg. i started to read and literally couldn’t stop! I decided to order the book - it’s a small book actually - but i’d like you to experience a few little excerpts here and see if your own fancy is tickled in the same way as mine was.
first a little background about the author and especially about “my antonia”.
willa was born on december 7, 1873 in back creek valley, a tiny community near the blue ridge mountains in virginia. in 1883 her family moved to join willa's grandparents william and caroline and her uncle george in webster county, nebraska. quite a trek! a year later they moved to red cloud, a nearby railroad town, where her father opened a loan and insurance office. the family never became rich or influential, and willa attributed their lack of financial success to her father, whom she claimed placed intellectual and spiritual matters over the commercial. imagine!
her mother was mostly concerned with fashion and tried desperately to turn willa into "a lady", in spite of the fact that willa didn’t have a lot of interest in looking like or acting like the stereotypical girl of the time and cut her hair short and wore trousers. when one of willa's stories for a writing class got published, she discovered a passion for writing had been fermenting within her.
in 1917 she wrote my antonia while living in new hampshire.
here are some selected passages from my antonia by willa cather
“I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it.”
“Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”
“I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe along the west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at night-fall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”
-from My Antonia by Willa Cather
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