My Ántonia

by Willa Cather

The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things.

It’s through myself that I knew and felt her,

I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form. It hasn’t any title, either.”

“Life of Jesse James,”

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.

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away.

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.

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.

I remembered what the conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood.

His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes—like something from which all the warmth and light had died out.

She looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say.

Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

Beautiful story

It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the magical light of the late afternoon.

The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

There never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had.

I had killed a big snake—I was now a big fellow.

their very roughness and violence made them defenceless.

Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.

I got “Robinson Crusoe” and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours.

I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his own country.

There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were sitting there with him. I went over all that Ántonia had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game—belonging, as Ántonia said, to the “nobles”—from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that forest, and if anyone killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories, not yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.

But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish: he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.

You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die.

You won’t forget my father, Jim?” “No,” I said, “I will never forget him.”

“Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!” she used to sing joyfully. “I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.”

I used to lie in my bed by the open window, watching the heat lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt frame of the windmill against the blue night sky.

So beautiful

Now they got on the westbound train one morning, in their Sunday clothes, with their oilcloth valises—and I never saw them again.

Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.

and “Molly” was engraved inside Johnnie’s ring and on his watch-case—doubtless on his heart, too.

When boys and girls are growing up, life can’t stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no.

If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English.

There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full, intense eyes.

tide. She danced every dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz—the waltz of coming home to something, of inevitable, fated return.

“I don’t care anything about any of them but you,”

Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Ántonia!

I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Ántonia, but I never did.

“I would and I wouldn’t. I expect I know the country girls better than you do. You always put a kind of glamour over them. The trouble with you, Jim, is that you’re romantic.

“It must make you very happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in.

Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me as I passed her gate, and asked me to come in and let her play for me.

So adorable

When I was little I used to go down there to hear them talk—beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country.” “What did they talk about?” I asked her. She sighed and shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know! About music, and the woods, and about God, and when they were young.”

While she talked, I lay back in the hot sand and looked up at the blue sky between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the bees humming and singing, but they stayed up in the sun above the flowers and did not come down into the shadow of the leaves.

Beautiful description...beautiful view

“Some day, Tony, I am going over to your country, and I am going to the little town where you lived.

While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.

in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to flee.

That’s Ántonia’s failing, you know; if she once likes people, she won’t hear anything against them.”

everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted.

Lena was at least a woman, and I was a man.

Wherever and whenever that piece is put on, it is April.

We were all three in love with Lena.

Funny