Cather Studies, Volume 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination

Willa Cather, Learner

Willa Cather, Learner T H O M A S J . L Y O N Three years ago, my wife Jan and I were enjoying an autumn Sunday morning in The Mill, in Lincoln, when, as it seemed, Willa Cather walked slowly past our little table. Dressed for church as a good, still family-involved twelve-year-old ought to be, her figure square-built and still androgynous-seeming, her person quiet and unobtrusive, this girl circled slowly and attentively through the big room. Her mind was absorbed in the diverse mix of coffee-drinkers and paper-readers, whom she saw one by one, without staring. This intelligent young girl was gathering material. Sounds and images and the warm, bakery fragrance of the place, the whole ambience, were registering. You could see learning happening as clearly as watching India ink spread indelibly into soft paper. I am going to argue that the real Willa Cather was also and above all a learner in this same way, and that her deepest-going books are about learning—that is, about sensitivity and vulnerability , and the extraordinary beauty of human consciousness when it is young and free. This sensitivity is also, I believe, the basis of the ecological imagination. Cather’s capacity to see a man or a woman, to imagine their inward life, is at root the same as her ability to feel the “light reflecting, wind-loving trees in the desert” (The Song of the Lark 37) and to describe the living landscape of a redrock canyon, or the open prairie. It is all one sensibility. It is in terms of this awareness, this capacity to learn, that she understands life and the characters in it. What is the real, fundamental difference between Thea Kronborg and her sister Anna? Between Claude and Bayliss Wheeler? Between Alexandra on the one hand and 89 90 thomas j. lyon her brothers Lou and Oscar Bergson? I think the ruling question for Willa Cather was, has the freshness been kept? Is the person still alive at the quick, and learning? We might also ask, historically, whether we, as a people immersed in machinery and our much-worshiped market, are losing the one fine thing we’ve got, the capacity to learn and in that openness to give sympathy? The essential difference between Claude and Bayliss Wheeler is a matter of elasticity of consciousness. The crux of Godfrey St. Peter’s terrifying crisis is that the freshness of discovery and learning, renewed by his relationship with Tom Outland, and which he, Godfrey, had then somehow conveyed in his histories, is leaving him. The mysterious essence of the New Mexico morning for Archbishop Latour, the something “that whispered to the ear on the pillow,” revives youthful sensitivity and appetite. It keeps him a learning, young man. To learn, in the sense I am outlining, is not at all to gather knowledge in the sense of discrete facts. Learning in the “Tom Outland” way, as we might call it, is not an intellectual process, but rather a continuing unsettlement and opening of consciousness as a whole. The power to relate, to see inside, to feel with another, transcends intellect and language. By the same token, the power to understand ecosystems, to sense in one’s bones the relational glue that holds the natural world together, does not come about by accumulating data. You can hang dozens of radio collars on animals, and by satellite come to know where the animals spend their time, but this information hasn’t anything to do with a member’s insight. The data-gathering kind of knowledge is in fact not entirely benign. It feeds into the philosophy of materialism and mechanism . Data-gathering, when dominant in the mind, leads toward coldness and arrogance. René Descartes, who described dataconsciousness as clearly as anyone has, went so far as to argue that animals didn’t really suffer pain. They are machines, he wrote (37–38). A novelist, a great novelist, needs a consciousness much deeper, much more comprehensive. I think it will shed light on Willa Cather’s achievement, in particular her ecological sensitivity, to look at the human mental 91 Willa Cather, Learner spectrum and try to say what most of us do with our evolutionary gift. Picture, if you will, the range of our capabilities. At one side of the spectrum, is the power to distinguish this from that, to...