For my reading I chose two bits
from My Ántonia by Willa Cather. We named our daughter after the main character,
not least because of the way Cather’s Ántonia tackles adversity throughout the
story and finds a pathway to happiness.
I read small sections from the beginning of the story and the end.
The process of thinking about hope
and why this particular book has had such an impact on my own life was a good
one. The thoughts that came from
the process seemed worth sharing.
We meet Ántonia Shimerda the day her family arrives from
Central Europe to the then unsettled prairie of Nebraska. Jim Burden, the narrator of the
story, arrives on the prairie by happenstance on the same day, off the same train. He is a young boy traveling from
Virginia to live with his grandparents.
His parents have both just died.
I read first Jim’s description of
arriving on the unbroken prairie that first night. He has just been put onto the back of a buckboard in Black
Hawk, Nebraska, late at night, after a long journey from Virginia, to ride out into
the dark to live on a prairie farm with grandparents he’s never met:
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. I did not believe that my dead father
and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me
at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the
mountain pastures. I had left even
their spirits behind me. The wagon
jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt
erased, blotted out. I did not say
my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.
I know this is not a hopeful
passage. I know too the hurt and
loss and loneliness Jim describes he felt on this particular night comes to us
all at one point or another. From this despair Jim makes a childhood on the prairie with his pioneer
grandparents. He and Ántonia
become fast friends. There is joy
and love and life over the next few hundred pages of the story.
There is more sadness and loss too.
Ántonia’s life has very hard
patches; her family has deep troubles. The life on the prairie is difficult and Cather does not shy away from it. The move to America is far from the dream. Among the many hard bits, Ántonia tragically loses her father, a ray of
light in her life, but she does not lose herself. The book takes us through the journey of
these two people as they grow up and away, make their lives, and circles back
as Jim – finally brave enough – comes home to Nebraska to see his childhood
friend.
In the last few paragraphs of the
book Jim describes the end of his visit back to Black Hawk, as he walks around the very ground his journey started a lifetime ago.
In this passage Cather is able to show
graphically the essence of what I find hopeful about life, even a life full of
loss and hard bits and despair:
As I wandered over
those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble upon a bit of the first
road that went from Black Hawk out to the north country; to my grandfather’s
farm, then on to the Shimerdas’ ….
Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the highways were
surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was all that was left
of that old road which used to run like a wild thing across the open prairie,
clinging to the high places and circling and doubling like a rabbit before the
hounds.
On
the level and the tracks had almost disappeared – were mere shadings in the
grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to
find. The rains had made channels
of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deeply that the sod had never healed over
them. …
This
was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the
train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children,
being taken we knew not whither. I
had only to close my eyes to hear the rumblings of the wagons in the dark, and
to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near
that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having
found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny
…. Whatever we had missed, we
possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
I see in Cather’s description of
the old road an analogy to strong, good memories; thoughts we have and can hold
of people and places long gone. Memories burned in 'so deeply' nothing will heal over them. Without
these memories – put in some perspective and kept close – life would be less.
In the frontpiece to My Ántonia Cather quotes Virgil: Optima
dies … prima fugit.
‘The best days are the first to go.’ It is true, what is best is almost
always fleeting, just in front of us, hard to appreciate and gone in a flash.
I don’t know if this is what we all
mean by hope, but to me much of what there is to be hopeful about is simply the
every day. The strength of our experiences. Memorize them. Memorize
the people, the places, the events of life.
Goodness comes and we just have to be prepared to see it.
David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2013 David Rocchio
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