Tag Archives: Willa Cather

Many wonderful things.

books, church, food and cooking, home, my garden, , , , , , , , ,
The turtle is an old pool toy.

As summer warmth makes the lizards and bees busier, so it works on me. The point of Too Much Heat might lie ahead at some point, but evidently I am still on the continuum with no end in sight. New opportunities and fun things have recently come into my life, so that my calendar has been over-full for a couple of weeks, and my heart the same. So far I haven’t reached the stage where I am craving empty days… but today I am a little bit at loose ends, and probably distracted by the wildfire smoke that is drifting south from the Woodside Fire up on the coast, not close to us, but making the air unhealthy.

I don’t like having to keep the house closed up against smoke, but I am glad the indoor spaces had cooled off the night before the smoke blew in; I had closed all the windows and shades that morning, and in the evening it was still cool, so we didn’t open the windows when the sun went down. Our only “AC” is the marine air that almost always flows into the neighborhood in the evenings or at least at night. So far, the heat (about 90 degrees at the moment) has not seeped indoors very much.

Leaving comfort behind me, I walked out the door into the smoky heat to add water to the fountain, to see new things that have bloomed, and to deadhead a little. I tend to focus on garden “problems” that need fixing — transplanting, weeding, trimming, irrigating. But when I don’t have it in me to do actual work, I usually can remember to just look around and be thankful — for my patch of paradise.

At church, we had a funeral this week, and I was able to participate in commending a 90-year-old child of God to her Father. Our funerals are so nourishing to the soul, as the hymns and prayers acknowledge our grief, and help us grieve in what is ultimately a healing way. The Church and her sacraments are truly full of Christ, His Life and Love, and I come out of every funeral full to the brim.

I told my priest that I wish I had a book into which I had transcribed over the years all the short homilies he has given at the end of funerals. Each is unique to the person and the situation, but they all are incredibly rich and edifying. Next week will be another funeral, for a priest dear to me, and I am very interested to learn how that is different from other funerals in the Orthodox Church.

I trimmed all the lavender but two bushes that the bees were still visiting, though they are faded quite a bit. Another purple note showed up in soup I made, using gifted carrots, cabbage from the freezer, a few ingredients from my garden: Painted Lady beans, kale, parsley, and tarragon.

I have joined a small in-person book group reading The Ethics of Beauty (by Timothy Patitsas) together every week, and an on-line class to study Universal History. I’m planning a trip to see my granddaughter Ivy in a youth musical production, and will continue visits about once a month to the nearby house of a family at church, to read stories to three young children. This is one of my very favorite activities, and it’s so sweet how this arrangement benefits all of us.

My new housemate Bea has been with me now for about a week. We are already having a good time brainstorming about various events we’d like to collaborate on, around books, high schoolers, tea, cooking… She’s baking a cake at this moment, and almost every day she is playing the piano, and that makes the house feel right.

Our usual women’s book group continues, and we have been reading Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. It’s the second time I’ve read it, and I love it still. I’ve been reading Death Comes for the Archbishop over and over, because the narrator and the story are very calming, when I wake in the night and can’t go back to sleep on my own. For the first time ever I’m reading The Iliad in the original (translated), and that has been satisfying. Because I haven’t read the whole of the Odyssey before, either, I’m a little reluctant to jump into watching the new movie based on it. But I’ve read plenty of interesting reviews!

My large Nodding Violet plant I have been planning to give away as soon as it started blooming again, which is Now! If you live nearby and want it, let me know in a direct message. It needs protection from frost, so I bring it indoors in winter, but many people in my area leave them under a roof outdoors.

Here is a clearer photo of it from a year ago:

At the moment I can’t remember what this plant is… I think a salvia. But it is the one that pulled me outside this afternoon when I saw it out the window. One of the bright and wonderful things in my life right now.

The birches in deathless marble.

beauty, poetry, summer, winter,

I SOUGHT THE WOOD IN WINTER

I sought the wood in summer
             When every twig was green;
The rudest boughs were tender,
            And buds were pink between.
Light-fingered aspens trembled
            In fitful sun and shade,
And daffodils were golden
            In every starry glade.
The brook sang like a robin—
            My hand could check him where
The lissome maiden willows
            Shook out their yellow hair.

“How frail a thing is Beauty,”
            I said, “when every breath
She gives the vagrant summer
            But swifter woos her death.
For this the star dust troubles,
            For this have ages rolled:
To deck the wood for bridal
            And slay her with the cold.”

I sought the wood in winter
            When every leaf was dead;
Behind the wind-whipped branches
            The winter sun set red.
The coldest star was rising
            To greet that bitter air,
The oaks were writhen giants;
            Nor bud nor bloom was there.
The birches, white and slender,
            In deathless marble stood,
The brook, a white immortal,
            Slept silent in the wood.

“How sure a thing is Beauty,”
            I cried. “No bolt can slay,
No wave nor shock despoil her,
            No ravishers dismay.
Her warriors are the angels
            That cherish from afar,
Her warders people Heaven
            And watch from every star.
The granite hills are slighter,
            The sea more like to fail;
Behind the rose the planet,
            The Law behind the veil.”

-Willa Cather

Nadezhda Bogomolova, Birch Trees

Apples and apples and a book.

books, food and cooking, other gardens, , , , , ,

From the book Apples, by Roger Yepsen.

My kitchen and both refrigerators are overflowing with apples right now, as I recently made my annual visit to the apple farm I am so fond of. I’ve made jars and jars of applesauce to put in the freezer, at this point mostly from unpeeled Jonathans, which after it has cooked down and been put into pint jars, makes as pretty and pink a picture as I have ever had a hand in painting. It’s a good time to revisit as well this passage from a favorite novel, which I first shared ten years ago:

             – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia held a special place in the hearts of both my late husband and me, perhaps in our conjugal heart ? by reason of our sharing the story together more than once, and reading it on our own as well. When I’ve read it aloud it’s not uncommon for me to start sobbing at places in the narrative where the pathos hits home.

I was surprised to see recently a review in which the reader did not enjoy Cather’s writing, saying it was dry and lacking emotion. Those qualities might be why I appreciate her skill at capturing the story and drawing us in. Cather gives us the perspective of Jim, and we experience with him as narrator the various levels on which he is in love with our heroine and all that she represents, and he makes us fall in love with her, too.

Our differing response from the reviewer above probably has something to do with what we bring to the story. Though we haven’t lived in Nebraska or known any Bohemians, perhaps we are like Jim (and Willa Cather) in our grieving for the past, for the lifestyle of the pioneers and their farm life, for the good hardworking people we have lost; as I understand it, that was a theme that reappears in many of her works, but she accomplishes it without what might be called “emotional” prose. Mr. Glad and I both have farming in our roots, and our love for nature and the outdoors (and for people) is only encouraged and expanded by reading books like this.

I thought to transcribe some passages from the book on my blog, representative snatches for my own enjoyment and yours, as a way to savor again some moments from my reading experience, and perhaps introduce people who haven’t yet made friends with these characters and their world.

In the novel, there is no question but that Jim must leave the country life and go away to school and to city life. The passage below is from the last part of the book when he returns many years later for a visit, and I appreciate the way it conveys something of Ántonia’s character and also the mood of this season of the year.

“At some distance behind the house were an ash grove and two orchards: a cherry orchard, with gooseberry and currant bushes between the rows, and an apple orchard, sheltered by a high hedge from the hot winds. The older children turned back when we reached the hedge, but Jan and Nina and Lucie crept through it by a hole known only to themselves and hid under the low-branching mulberry bushes.

“As we walked through the apple orchard, grown up in tall bluegrass, Ántonia kept stopping to tell me about one tree and another. ‘I love them as if they were people,’ she said, rubbing her hand over the bark. ‘There wasn’t a tree here when we first came. We planted every one, and used to carry water for them, too — after we’d been working in the fields all day. Anton, he was a city man, and he used to get discouraged. But I couldn’t feel so tired that I wouldn’t fret about these trees when there was a dry time. They were on my mind like children. Many a night after he was asleep I’ve got up and come out and carried water to the poor things. And now, you see, we have the good of them. My man worked in the orange groves in Florida, and he knows all about grafting. There ain’t one of our neighbors has an orchard that bears like ours.’

“…The afternoon sun poured down on us through the drying grape leaves. The orchard seemed full of sun, like a cup, and we could smell the ripe apples on the trees. The crabs hung on the branches as thick as beads on a string, purple-red, with a thin silvery glaze over them. Some hens and ducks had crept through the hedge and were pecking at the fallen apples.”

–Willa Cather

Orchardside by Richard Thorn

Jacinto and the Bishop

books, quotes, , , , ,

When they are traveling around the American Southwest visiting the many and remote parishes in their huge diocese, the French priests in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop often have an Indian companion along. At night they camp on the desert sand. This passage is excerpted from the tale of one such journey:

Kneeling on either side of the embers they repeated their prayer together and then rolled up in their blankets. The Bishop went to sleep thinking with satisfaction that he was beginning to have some sort of human companionship with his Indian boy. One called the Indians “boys,” perhaps because there was something youthful and elastic in their bodies. Certainly about their behavior there was nothing boyish in the American sense, or even in the European sense.

Jacinto was never, by any chance, naïf; he was never taken by surprise. One felt that his training, whatever it had been, had prepared him to meet any situation which might confront him. He was as much at home in the Bishop’s study as in his own pueblo — and he was never too much at home anywhere. Father Latour felt he had gone a good way toward gaining his guide’s friendship, though he did not know how.

The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop’s way of meeting people; thought he had the right tone with Padre Jesus, and that he had good manners with the Indians. In his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face. There were many kinds of false faces; Father Vaillant’s, for example, was kindly but too vehement. The Bishop put on none at all. He stood straight and turned to the Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. Jacinto thought this remarkable.

-Willa Cather

Maybe the Bishop and Jacinto share some qualities of character, and that’s why they appreciate one another. One aspect of Bishop Latour’s character that I see is his humility. In fact, perhaps there is a double meaning in the book’s title: not just the usual meaning of the ending of his earthly life, which we read about in the last pages, but also the little deaths that come to him day by day, not adding up but subtracting bit by bit from the possibility of earthly glory that might have been his, if he had given his fine mind and life to a different life back in France. Instead of fame and accomplishment, he sees defeat on many levels. But he accepts that.

Fr. Stephen Freeman recently wrote in “The Despised God” about the humility of God. He says, “The ‘glory’ of God is not the glory of wondrous success, shining fame and an incomparable reputation. Instead, we are told that we behold the glory of God ‘in the face of Jesus Christ.’… The crucifixion of Christ for Paul is more than an event that accomplishes salvation – it is an event that reveals Him in His fullness.”

“For many, such meekness in Christ is treated as something of a disguise, or a temporary work for the purpose of salvation. They all too quickly turn away from this understanding to assert that ‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead!’ But there is nothing to indicate that the definition of glory is somehow being altered for the sake of the Second Coming. As for the imagery of the Revelation of St. John, it should be read through the Cross rather than used as a corrective for the Cross.

“… the friends of God are foolish, weak, base and despised. That is the narrow way. Interestingly, it is a way that is the most open for all to walk. We need not be wise, strong, and well-thought-of. It turns the world upside-down and our lives along with it.

“Right now the world is desperate for a few fools.”

-Fr. Stephen Freeman