Nidhi Singh's Reviews > My Ántonia

To speak her name was to call up pictures of peoples and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain.

‘My Antonia’ is a story of home and homesickness. Of the memories of a lost home that persist in the mindscape as the warm gusts of wind and the singing of the larks. The home of that golden sunshine and yellow leaves, red shaggy grass and blue skies. The images which make me think of home as the quietest, friendliest corner of a crowded and uncaring street, of that kind touch in midst of the falling walls of life, of the bittersweet pain that persists in the heart as long as one lives. The place one always wants to go back to but holds over thinking how it must have changed and how we must have changed with the passing of the years. Or a look of longing evoked as the eyes meet the face of the beloved. Antonia, the beloved, who could never be yours, who you want to look at just for a moment longer, want to make her stay but have to let go. Because what she is, is everything that is earthy and beautiful, and essential and heart-felt, and primitive and pristine, and childhood and innocence, and life and love, and its harshness and tenderness, and its hard earned lessons. Everything that is lost and never recovered and never forgotten. And everything of what the home and the past is made of.

Between the earth and the sky I felt erased blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

This subsequent feeling of obliteration in the immensity of the prairies, the rustling of the red and gold autumn leaves in the high wind, the blazing force of winter wiping out the loveliness of summer, the stinging and delighting power of nature, the rejuvenation that comes with the changing seasons is a perfect ode to a transcendent vision and to everything that was put together by the pioneers for survival and persistence. It is something that is gripping as terror, which trembles the soul with its strangeness and yet makes the heart leap with ecstasy by permitting that space for humanity. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. It is the unforgiving elemental force of nature that belittles the feeling of spatial and cultural estrangement however strong that might be. Because now, everything has to be built and rebuilt, and scrounged and hunted for. The past becomes a slate of memories of beautiful drawings. Something to be looked at with adoring, piercing nostalgia, but never to be turned back to.

Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Antonia!

Maybe it is true that Jim is too much of a romantic. He declares his inability to lose himself among impersonal things, with his memory always crowded with people and places of his own past, strengthened and simplified like the unchanging blue of a clear summer sky. And his story is formed by rivulets of episodes, storytelling, impressions that are mostly his own and those that are gathered. His narrative is flawed, imperfect, tinged with too much emotion, inhibited with inaction, with less beginnings and greater musings over closed chapters. He never gives away everything about himself. He gives away his dreams but also his felt inability to understand them. There is so much we don’t understand of ourselves and our lives and of those we love. Of our hurts, and bitterness and disappointments with them. It is one of the things that grant authenticity to our own experiences and feelings. There is something in it that gives the same strength and pulse to loving and remembering, like the force that beckons Blind d’ Arnault to the piano. The necessity of loving and remembering. Loving them for what they are, what they have meant to us, and what we have shared together; the un-sharable and the incommunicable.

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.