Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

Cather’s Secular Humanism: Writing Anacoluthon and Shooting Out into the Eternities

186 Cather’s Secular Humanism Writing Anacoluthon and Shooting Out into the Eternities J O S E P H R . U R G O Traveling lady stay awhile Until the night is over I’m just a station on your way I know I’m not your lover. —Leonard Cohen, “Winter Lady,” from Songs of Leonard Cohen It is something one has lived through, not a story one has read; less diverting than a story, perhaps, but more inevitable. One is “left with it,” in the same way that one is left with a weak heart after certain illnesses. A shadow has come into one’s consciousness that will not go out again. —Willa Cather, “A Chance Meeting” W I N T E R L A D Y When a writer reaches iconic status, we seek less to find a context through which we may comprehend the author (how and why should she be read?) and begin to contemplate the various contexts made available to us through the author’s work. The iconic, in other words, is an intellectual force that shapes consciousness—or, in Cather’s language, casts a shadow on our 187 Cather’s Secular Humanism minds. As we scrutinize the words and the meanings, we find we cannot turn any away; and as we encounter new ways of receiving texts, we are not at liberty to refuse the implications they bring. On the contrary, the writer whom we acknowledge as iconic we also acknowledge as having, to an extent we seek to realize, produced the way we think. Willa Cather possessed a hard-thinking and fierce secular humanism. One is awed by her habitual attraction, in her subject matter, to depictions of strong, enabling systems of belief—so much so that she is often thought to be a “believer.” But she was not a believer in any particular theology or political program or cause. It was the phenomenon of belief that fired her imagination, whether manifest as patriotism, Catholicism, racial hierarchy, talent, ambition—whatever it was that moved people to something particularly fine. This fire turned her into what “Canadian of the future” Leonard Cohen calls, in another context , “Winter Lady”: traveling from setting to setting seeking out the best that was ever desired, the finest manifestations of ideas that leave shadows on consciousness, and of shadows that result in the very finest of human things. One might see a Catherian spirit in Leonard Cohen’s image: “Traveling lady stay awhile / Until the night is over / I’m just a station on your way / I know I’m not your lover.” Cather is a great American liberator, an author who truly understood the potential of American secular and humanistic pluralism to serve art and to advance the human condition by lifting it above the denominational. She wrote into it, out of it, and in 1931, at the very height of her career, structured it into a best-selling novel in the same year she received honorary degrees from Princeton and Berkeley and made the cover of Time magazine . The title of the novel, Shadows on the Rock, evokes Plato’s cave, the chained beings who watch the shadows of reality on the cave wall and never know more than what is called “the visible region,” and who pride themselves on being “the quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences, and coexistences.” Those who are dragged away from the shadows are able to contemplate the “true nature” of what “it is that provides the sea- 188 jo s e p h r . u r g o sons and the courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some sort the cause of all these things that they had seen” (Book 7: 514–17).1 However, those who glimpse the eternities do not easily integrate back among the shadows. According to this philosophical tableau, human beings are prisoners of their limited perception and their attenuated consciousness , and we are further demarcated by the senses through which we are compelled to experience and contemplate reality. What we normally consider to be the real are shadows of ultimate phenomena. Certain intellects, those able to free themselves from sense perception and transcend the shadowy world, those of philosophical capacity, are able to break free of the chains, called “systems of thought...