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Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913
Alexandra Bergson was a girl when her father died on the Nebraska prairie. He told her brothers to be guided by her.
Most people thought the land was hopeless. She thought otherwise, and over the years she made it one of the richest farms on the Divide.
Carl Linstrum was the boy from the next homestead, the one person who ever really understood her. His family gave up on the prairie and moved away when they were young.
Now he has come back, after many years, with no money and nothing much to show for himself. She is no longer young either.
Her brothers are furious. They tell her people are laughing, that at her age it is ridiculous, and that he is only after her property.
In the middle of all this, talking with her, Carl says the sentence below. He is not arguing with anybody. He is just telling her the truth.
“Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.”
Fiercely.
Look where he put that word. Not faithfully, not endlessly, not wearily, which is what we have been taught to expect of anything old.
Two or three stories. That is all there are, he says, and one of them is a woman who wanted somebody and was told she had waited too long.
You have heard that story. You have heard it so many times you assumed it was finished, that it belonged to other women, younger ones, the ones in the films.
Now listen to me. He says the story does not wear out from being told.
It repeats itself as if it had never happened before. As if.
The want you are carrying is not a copy. It is not a rerun of somebody else's better-timed life.
When it happens to you, it is the first time it has ever happened. And it will be fierce.
And then the larks. Five notes, thousands of years, the same five notes, and not one lark on that prairie has ever sung them apologetically.
I need you to hear how much is in that. Nobody tells the lark the song has already been done.
We are told it every day. That there is an age for wanting, and a woman who still wants past it should keep her voice down.
Cather put this sentence into a book about a woman her own brothers were embarrassed by. A woman who had built everything with her own hands and was then informed, by the men who lived off it, that love was beneath her dignity now.
The sentence does not agree with them. Neither do I.
This book is more than a hundred years old. It is short, it is free, and almost none of us have opened it.
Underneath it I wrote
Mine is happening for the first time.
Today. Copy Carl's sentence by hand, all of it, the larks included. Then write one line underneath about the story you thought was already finished. Do not make it pretty. Make it fierce.
What I wrote that year
In March of the year I could not write, I copied a page of Cranford in pencil because I could not find a pen. Underneath it I wrote three words: "Still copying. Still."
I remember being annoyed that I had written "still" twice. I almost rubbed one out.
I am glad now that I left it. The second one was the only word I meant that whole year.
