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."