Neighbor Rosicky by Willa Cather

I’m glad we got extra time to blog about Neighbor Rosicky by Willa Cather because I really enjoyed it. I’ve read My Antonia, also by Cather, in the past and I found several similarities between the two. Both compare the vast differences in living in a town or city and living out in the country, favoring the farm life. I found Cather’s obvious love of the country and the beauty of nature to be refreshing and her apparent distrust of humanity (particularly those residing in the city) amusing. Her description of “the clump of orchard behind and the windmill before, and all down the gentle hill-slope the rows of pale gold cornstalks stood out against the white field” (pg. 842) brings to mind something perhaps from the childhood of Huck Finn and makes me want to raise my children in the country where they “could lie down in the long grass and see the complete arch of sky over [them], hear the wagons go by” (pg. 842). Also, the fact that “the worst things he had come upon in his journey through the world were human- depraved and poisonous specimens of man” (pg. 854) I thought was sadly accurate, but also amusing. That makes me sound really jaded but, like Rosicky, I too wish it were possible for my children to “get through the world without ever knowing much about the cruelty of human beings” (pg. 854), but that unfortunately is of course unrealistic.

I also fell in love with the character of Anton Rosicky. His outlook on life is just so fresh and optimistic and he certainly “had a special gift for loving people…it was quiet, unobtrusive, it was merely there” (pg. 856). Rosicky is that typical loving, warm-hearted grandpa character that everyone wants around. He was indeed a hard worker, he had to be living on a farm, but Rosicky also knew how to fully enjoy life: “…somehow he never saved anything. He couldn’t refuse a loan to a friend, and he was self-indulgent. He liked a good dinner, and a little went for beer, a little for tobacco; a good deal went to the girls” (pg. 845). Rosicky managed to get by in life, raise his family up right, work hard, but still stop to smell the roses and live a little, and for that I admire him (fictitious as he may be).