by Maria Popova
“That is happiness; to be
dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as
naturally as sleep.”
The history of recorded thought is strewn with evidence that happiness lives
in the most ordinary of moments. And yet no matter how
universal a human aspiration it may be, articulating happiness in those rare
moments when it is perfectly attained remains an elusive art. For Albert Camus,
it was a
moral obligation; for Mary Oliver, a
kind of seizure; for Kurt Vonnegut, a
sense of enoughness. But nowhere have I
encountered an account of happiness more soulful and deeply alive than in a
passage from Willa Cather’s first masterwork, the 1918 novel My Ántonia (public
library) — the story of a spirited pioneer named
Ántonia Shimerda, who settles as in Nebraska as a child and grows with the
land, told through the loving and wakeful eyes of her childhood friend Jim
Burden.
In this passage, Cather’s
narrator is lying in his grandmother’s garden, drowsy and drunk with life under
the warm autumn sun:
The earth was warm under
me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came
out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion,
with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not
expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it,
like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely
happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something
entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that
is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes
to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
The truth and beauty of
this vignette never left the soul from which it sprang. Cather requested that
her grave site, which she shared with her
partner, bear the inscription: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into
something complete and great.”
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/26/willa-cather-my-antonia-happiness/?mc_cid=32c8c0dfcd&mc_eid=4b7757b56b
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