My Antonia

Recently My Antonia by Willa Cather made it to the top of my reading pile. As I get older and my years growing up in Iowa get further and fewer I get more romantic about life there and My Antonia is nothing if not romantic. I was pleased to see that Cather and I shared some of the same notions about the effect of the wide open landscape and harsh weather on the people there. A shared notion seems more likely to be one of those with a grain of truth in it. Forgive me for providing a few excerpts here since I cannot possibly improve upon her writing.

The landscape:
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall.

The ingenue at the theater:
This introduced the most brilliant, wordly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon. I had never seen champagne bottles opened on the stage before--indeed, I had never seen them opened anywhere... The men were dressed more or less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not. I saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one's horizon. One could experience excess and satiety without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a drawing-room.

Small town pass-times:
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her washbowls and pitchers, and her husband's shaving mug, were covered with violets and lilies. Once, when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips as if she were going to faint and said grandly: "Mr. Cutter, you have broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!"

Religion:
Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body formed a letter "S." I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather. He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt people's feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree before, but now, with some one kneeling before it--images, candles... Grandfather merely put his finger tips to his brow and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere... As we turned back into the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. "The prayers of all good people are good," he said quietly.