They'll say...

We've got nothing in common.
No common ground to start from.
And we're falling apart.

You'll say,
the world has come between us.
Our lives have come between us.
But I know you just don't care.

Speaking of books ... My Antonia. Nevermind thumbing the pages, I haven't cracked that spine in a while. So while the little details are lost, I remember the takeaway theme:

It was a happy ending, don't you think? The narrator, voiced by Cather, returning to find his childhood friend a beacon of fecundity. A healthy, strong farmwoman, surrounded on all sides by her brood of growing gosling -- strong, healthy young men and women, expanding their holding, and growing in the prairies the next generation of the American Dream. (remember how Antonio's father made out early on, and how his grandchildren lived to see his dream through?)

Cather might not have chosen that life for herself, but in her work, she painted a portrait of the prairies and the people who came -- truly hungry and with little -- who made their way inland rejecting East Coast monied ways, to grow the country. Strong, hearty survivors ... like Antonia.

Cather didn't hit you over the head with the happiness -- she showed you the price paid, and again, when the reader goes back and encounters her with ... Jim Burden (I looked it up, the name she gave, that is), it's really up to the reader to decide if it's happy or sad. But I take that back, the part about the ending -- the emphasis on all the growing life around her, the beauty of those final pages in the reunion between the two, I never read that as an ending really...


Have a great Friday, and a healthy weekend.