July 31, 2004 at 3:05 AM

I received my textbooks for school today and was paging through the English one when I came across the short story "A Wagner Matinee", by Willa Cather. Rarely have I connected with a piece of literature so profoundly. It is a narrative by a man describing a concert he attended with his aunt, a woman who taught at the Boston Conservatory years ago but then sacrificed her position to marry a Midwestern farmer and move with him to Nebraska. When his aunt visits him in Boston, the nephew takes her to a concert of Wagnerian music, although he is afraid she will no longer appreciate the music after having lived the hard life of a prairie woman for so long. The two arrive at the concert hall, take their seats, and listen to the orchestra.

After the concert is done, the aunt stares down at the stage until the musicians have left and the audience has scattered. The two last paragraphs of the story beautifully summarize her emptiness.

"I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly, 'I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!'"

"I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door."

For some reason, I really connected with that passage. Although generations separate myself from that hardworking woman of the plains, and our circumstances could hardly be more different, I still have her fear. Sometimes the joy of music seems too good to be true - and sometimes I'm so scared that someday I, too, might lose it.

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July 31, 2004 at 3:05 AM

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