57. MY ANTONIA

Willa Cather 1918

In a wondrous book set in all the glory of the past American Midwest, Jim, the narrator tells of his life in Nebraska and his recollection as he comes of age with a childhood friend, his Antonia, a woman who drew from him a beautiful life-long affection, respect and admiration.

'Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West.'(3)

'"I didn't arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Antonia's name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn't any form. It hasn't any title either." He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word "Antonia." He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it "My Antonia." That seemed to satisfy him.'(6)

'I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.'(9)

'As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.'(16)

'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 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 natural as sleep.'(17)

'You is just like big mans; you wait for him to lift his head and then you go for him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill.'(33)

'I never came upon this place without emotion, and in all the country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after the sunset.'(74)

'Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, 'My Antonia!"'(78)

'When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano...They found he had an absolute pitch, and a remarkable memory. As a very young child, he could repeat, after a fashion, any composition that was played for him...As piano playing it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses--that not only filled his dark mind, but worried his body incessantly.'(115)

'To dance "Home, Sweet Home," with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every dance like a Waltz--the waltz of coming home to something, of inevitable, fated return.'(134)

'When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you didn't return to anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around the hard-and-fast beat of the music.'(134)

'His zest in debauchery might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter's belief in it. The reckoning with his wife at the end of an escapade was something he counted on--like the last powerful liqueur after a long dinner. The one excitement he really couldn't do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!'(151)

'When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.'(162)

'She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears. Her warm had clasped mine.'(191)

'Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often that of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundred of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.'(192)

'In that singular light every little tree and stock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows int he fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the odd pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.'(192)

'About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant to always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.'(193)

'In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.'(197)

'Antonia had always been one to leave the images in the mind that did not fade--that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts on one's first primer...She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true.'(211)
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Barnes and Nobles Classics Edition 2003
222 pages
Book owned
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Personal note: In the afternoon after I bought this book I found this review from Ordinary Reader... she liked it, and so did I.