Friday, September 24, 2010

Passages

Months ago my whole family was together discussing the books we loved most (a post for another day because we listed some outstanding literature.) My mom was trying to decide on her all-time favorite and a few weeks later told me she had chosen a winner: My Antonia. It had been too many years since I read it (the summer before my senior year of HS) and could hardly remember it. So I grabbed it from my mom's book shelf and dug back in this summer.

It took me a while to finish as it is not exactly a page turner--more like a steady, rolling, poetic homage to the great American wilderness and the stalwart souls who dared to settle it. It is a book dedicated to its setting and filled with beautiful, deep descriptions of red wheat fields, stark, snowy hills, and sunsets on the prairie. It is also a story of humanity, both the ordinary and routine as well as the raw and emotional. It is a lovely piece of literature and I am glad I invested in it again--it definitely meant a lot more to me now than it did when I was 17.


A favorite passage:

"While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms [my education] 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...I begrudged the room that [they] 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 experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how."

Are those lines not true in some way or another for us all?



I also read Eat, Pray, Love last week (after I saw the movie--it worked for me because it included a lot of depth that the movie left out. And I thought the movie was fine--nothing amazing about it which meant the book could possibly sway me more in its favor. I think it did--not that it's one of my favorite novels, but a good read.)

I loved this concept from it:

"I keep remembering one of my guru's teachings about happiness. She said that people universally tend to think that happiness is s stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it...You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming, upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments."

4 comments:

Heidi said...

I have not read either of those books but they are in my list. I wish a certain someone could read and actually comprehend that second one.

I just finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog and definitely recommend it. I marked so many passages in it. It was one of the best I've read in a while.

Bobbi said...

My Antonia changed its impact for me, too, as I aged. Each time I read it, it is profound and deep. Not funny, not thrilling, but speaking to my inner American, European immigrant, mother, and lover of the land soul.
And Heidi, I'm glad you marked passages, I love to do that on a good book that I will be keeping. (And that's my copy, right?) I'd recommend it to you, Carrie. It was my favorite book of the summer.

Flori said...

My Antonia is a long-beloved favorite of mine too. The Eat Pray Love lady kind of bugged me though. Maybe I will appreciate Julia Roberts more. :) Have you read the Story of Edgar Sawtelle? It was my favorite summer book.

Anonymous said...

Maybe I should give each of these a try. But not until after baby because my brain can't even process the My Antonia quote right now! I have no brain power.

And I think I should see the movie and then do the book of Eat, Pray, Love. I do enjoy Julia and that might entice me to read the book.