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297 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1927
As they rode up to the door, a man came out, bareheaded, and they saw to their surprise that he was not a Mexican, but an American…He spoke to them in some drawling dialect they could scarcely understand and asked if they wanted to stay the night. During the few words they exchanged with him, Father Latour felt a growing reluctance to remain even for a few hours under the roof of this ugly, evil-looking fellow. He was tall, gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small, bony head. Under his close-clipped hair this repellant head showed a number of thick ridges, as if the skull joinings were overgrown by layers of superfluous bone. With its small, rudimentary ears, this head had a positively malignant look. The man seemed not more than half human, but he was the only householder on the lonely road to Mora…
'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.'
"While I‘m in the midst of this, I think it‘s Cather‘s best - reflective (perfect for now), and so subtly, magnificently complex and simple at once. A living look at landscape and gently fraught spirituality. Having finished, I find it a very hard book to mentally categorize. It‘s both like and completely unlike all Cather‘s other works. Recommended."
It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance. The Navajo hogans, among the sand and willows, were made of sand and willows. None of the pueblos would at that time admit glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection of the sun on the glazing was to them ugly and unnatural even dangerous. …..They seemed to have none of the European’s desire to ‘master’ nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction, in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of the earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse….The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
“Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he said at length. “One might almost stay that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
Once before he had been carried out of the body thus to a place far away. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey-sweet perfume. Mimosa - but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent one winter in his childhood...It's rare these days in reading that I'll come across a childhood thought or form, especially during my customary long bouts of first reads rarely broken by a revisit. These rediscoveries are not even guaranteed to be pleasant, for there is so much more to be aware of these days in terms of the lies youth is bred upon and only shamefully realized much later in time. So it was a marvel, then, that I found this pulsepoint of evocation in not one, but two pleasant forms, first in the synopsis and second in the cover illustration of my eventually happened upon edition. I am now determined to keep the name Sally Mara Sturman in mind for reasons of artistic acquisition, as well as a far off dream of a book of my own that needs favorable presenting to the world.
"No matter, Father. I see your redskins through Fenimore Cooper, and I like them so.Cather followed through with this in lavishing all of her attention on her Bishops and Priests and cutting every other category of character short, whether Mexican or Native American or female. The two main characters themselves may have been well intentioned and marvelously appreciative of their aesthetic surroundings, but there was far too much romanticization of one culture imposing itself on all the other for my tastes, whether it was the US clearing out land of its original inhabitants or missionaries seeing the unconverted as 'childish' and 'out of date' and converting them accordingly. I'm especially amazed at how unfavorably Cather treated her female characters; I don't expect authors to be especially able at crafting fictional personas based on amount of shared characteristics, but I've read male authors who were less misogynistic in their treatment.
...the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple...