Friday Joy - Willa Cather
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Willa Cather would definitely make my list of top 5 favorite authors. I first discovered her in high school, when I read her novel My Antonia. Later, during graduate school, I was able to design an independent study around her work, and I read steadily through most of her canon of heart-breakingly beautiful prose.
While my favorite Cather novel may always be The Song of the Lark, the book that started it all is still My Antonia. This novel contains such pure glimpses of narrative grace. Sometimes, when I read Cather's work, I think that she's an example of a writer who has 'touched God', or perhaps it's vice versa; perhaps in her most striking lines, she's channeling something divinely given. Perhaps God is coming to us, through her. For this edition of Friday Joy, may I offer this passage, from the final page of the first chapter of My Antonia:
"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."