My Antonia

Willa Cather. The name never conjured up thoughts of anything brilliant in my head. She was an author. An author about whom if you anything, you know that her more well known works of fiction were based in the Midwest--Nebraska, to be precise. Nebraska. It always sounded kind of boring to me. What exactly is in Nebraska? What kind of people live there? Farmers. Boring Farmers, of this stereotype I was certain. I have been pleasantly surprised by Willa Cather, and her stories of the Midwest.

As any great lover of literature does, I collect books. Any book. Hoping to someday read it. Well this was the case when I picked up My Antonia and decided to add it to my collection, if for no other reason than that it was a classic, and it would look good on my shelf. It sat there among other great works of literature on the top of my dusty bookshelf, for the past two years. Until yesterday afternoon.

When faced between the choice of Homer's ancient work and the agrarian work of Ms. Cather,I settled for what I assumed would be lighter reading. It was, I suppose, I have also discovered what may become one of my favorite classic works of literature by an American author. I have only read a few chapters into the book, but My Antonia is filled with descriptive language of landscape and thought. It is beautiful. Cather paints the picture of the prairie and its beauty through the eyes of a recently orphaned young boy, who is seeing all of its beauty for the first time.

Here are a few passages that I fell in love with so far.

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 sheep-fold 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.


As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the 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.


I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy blowing- morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping...


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 the sun and the sky were left and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them...I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.