MONDAY: "Ain't it wonderful, Jim," she said...

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2026

"...how much [we] can mean to each other?" Actually, no, we aren't "well read." But there's a line from My Antonia that seems to speak to us, loud and clear, at this dangerous, barely sane time.  

(This "barely sane" time? See the story the president told about the late Lindsey Graham's one, lone, solitary 40-minute mistake. Also, continue to see the way the high-end press will keep disappearing the president's fairly obvious state of illness.)  

Back to My Antonia:

We're fascinated by the way high-end commentators skip past the most intriguing part of Willa Cather's profoundly autobiographical novel. We refer to the way she gender-switched her narrator—letting Jim Burden (male) stand in as a substitute for her own (female) self.   

As described in Cather's novel, Jim Burden's life is Cather's life. We learn that in the first paragraph of Burden's narration:   

BOOK I. The Shimerdas

I

I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the ‘hands’ on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

By the norms of literary logic, the young Jim Burden's railroad trip, from Virginia to Nebraska during his childhood, is the real-world railroad trip of the young Willa Cather. She chose to gender-switch her narrator for reasons which are tragic but also understandable and, one assumes. which are also perfectly obvious.    

We think the gender-switch does undermine the ardor expressed at the end of the book. Decades earlier, when she's still "barely 24," the novel's Antonia says this to Jim Burden:   

BOOK IV. The Pioneer Woman’s Story   

[...]

She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. ‘I’d always be miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here. Father Kelly says everybody’s put into this world for something, and I know what I’ve got to do. I’m going to see that my little girl has a better chance than ever I had. I’m going to take care of that girl, Jim.’

I told her I knew she would. ‘Do you know, Ántonia, since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.’

She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them slowly, ‘How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?'...

In fact, she hadn't been his sweetheart or wife. We think the ardor he displays at the end of the book is undermined by that fact.

Still:

Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? At this very dangerous time, we Americans, Red and Blue alike, badly need to relearn the skill of meaning things to each other.   

"No people are uninteresting," the poet improbably said.