2024-12-25
Note: this page was last edited on 2024-12-26
While I want to keep the list of some of my favorites concise and perusable, I also want to share some of my perspective on the things I hold dear to me. It's to express (without an audience in mind), to share (now there's the audience), and to start conversation. It's always interesting to observe how different people hold onto different things.
Additionally, there might be spoilers for some of the items below, particularly with quotes from books.
I read this book in English class, and then took a subsequent class to read it again. I've read it many times and plan to read it more. The titular character, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, is not someone to emulate. He's shackled to his past, the possibility of youth, Sylvia Plath's branching fig tree. He is not the greatest husband and father. He scorns the world's spiraling decadence. Cather studies a man who in preserving a sense of stasis, loses. She handles loss and memory in a unique, unobstrusive way. While some might find the plot unsatisfactory, I read it again and again to study the afforded glimpses into St. Peter's mind, and to learn how to lose and remember the past.
My favorite scene, without question, is of St. Peter and his wife, Lillian, at the opera. I keep the exercept short, but in doing so fail to give such a poignant scene justice.
"My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young."
"How often I've thought that!" she replied with a faint, melancholy smile.
"You? But you're so occupied with the future, you adapt yourself so readily," he murmured in astonishment.
"One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn't the children who came between us." There was something lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.
"You, you too?" he breathed in amazement.
To me, the book is so un-Cather. It's not pastoral. Yearning is not for the plains of Nebraska, but the interior landscape of a past self. Why do depictions of landscape fall away with Godfrey St. Peter (most of the book), with only a glimpse of that vivid intensity in Tom's journal? The only answer is to read more Cather, and then to reread.
I had the chance to visit Palazzo Abatellis and see this painting in person. It's small, smaller than I expected--but absolutely breathtaking. The journey there remains one of my favorite days. I was in Palermo on a school trip and just knew that I had to see this painting--there was something about Mary's gaze that captivated like very few paintings had. Palazzo Abatellis was a bit of a walk from our hotel, so I explored the streets of Palermo, taking photos of the street art which I later used for a final project. I stayed there for quite some time, especially in Messina's room. I don't know much about Carlo Scarpa but the composition of the museum was very interesting and among my favorites. After, I went through the port/bay, stopped at a few shops, struggled to communicate with my limited Italian, and walked up Mount Pellegrino.