“Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out,” says Jim Burden, the narrator of Cather’s “My Ántonia.” “I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

“Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire,” Cather wrote, “whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

from an article about the endangered North American great plains in NYThttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/opinion/prairie-great-plains-trees.html