“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 

"The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
from My Antonia by Willa Cather

"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else,a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."
Willa Cather