Born
1873 western Virginia. Family moved west to Nebraska when she was 9. Became
journalist -- McClure's Magazine in NYC -- lived in New York 40 years but
rarely wrote about it. 1st short story published 1905; 1st novel published
1912 when she was 38.
In many ways, Cather's career is a self-conscious
bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries: interested in the transformation
of the nation through immigration and territorial expansion.
Her main subject -- transplanted Americans
and immigrants in the West -- Nebraska, Kansas, and in Death Comes for
the Archbishop and The Professor's House (1925), the Southwest.
By the time Cather is writing, of course, this is history. Her subject matter is history refracted through and retrieved by memory. As such, her work is as much about the way consciousness alters the past as it is about the way experience alters consciousness.
She died 1947.
Influenced by the work of Henri Bergson:
TWO types of memory:
The first is intellectual and conscious, the second unconscioushabit, or learned memory -- through this we orient ourselves in practical terms involuntary memory -- a surging up of moments from the past
TWO types of time:
1a. "One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome." (3)chronological or clock time -- in other words, a linear, unfolding, measured time -- time spatialised -- scientific time -- a useful human construction 'duration' or experienced, lived time; the ceaseless flow of change -- not linear but layered, simultaneous moments -- dynamic
-- season, time of day, year, number of people -- three important Europeans, one less important from America -- action, location, country.
1b. "One afternoon in the autumn of
1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through
an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico." (17)
-- time of day, season, year, number
of people/animals, action, location, country.
2. "This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape." (95)
3. "If Father Vaillant were here, he would say, 'A miracle'; that the Holy Mother, to whom he had addressed himself before the cruciform tree, had led him hither. And it was a miracle, Father Latour knew that. But his dear Joseph must always have the miracle very direct and spectacular, not with Nature, but against it." (29)
4. "One might almost say 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." (50)
5. "Their land [...] was a part of their religion; the two were inseparable. [...] Moreover, their gods dwelt there -- in those inaccessible white houses set in caverns up in the face of the cliffs, which were older than the white man's world, and which no living man had entered. Their gods were there, just as the Padre's God was in his church. [...] That canyon and the Shiprock were like kind parents to his people, places more sacred to them than churches, more sacred than any place is to the white man" (295)
6. "The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn't think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him." (92)
7. "These poor Mexicans, he reflected, were not the first to pour out their love in this simple fashion. Raphael and Titian had made costumes for Her in their time, and the great masters had made music for Her, and the great architects had built cathedrals for Her. Long before Her years on earth, in the long twilight between the Fall and the Redemption, the pagan sculptors were always trying to achieve the image of a goddess who should yet be a woman." (257)
8. "[O]ur first bells, and the introduction of the bell in the service all over Europe, originally came from the East [...] the Templars brought the Angelus back from the Crusades, and it is really an adaption of a Moslem custom. [...] When we first came here, the one good workman we found in Santa Fe was a silversmith. The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors" (45)
9. "He felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice at Calvary could hardly reach back so far." (100)
10. "He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams. Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock. Something reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like crustaceans in their armour." (103)
11. "He observed also that there was
no longer any perspective in his memories [...]. He was soon to have done
with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He
sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of
mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and
all comprehensible." (290)
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