Yin and Yang: Two Halves of Life

Literature, good literature, ought to enrich a person’s life. Literature holds a mirror up to humanity, unabashedly showing us our flaws and imperfections. It is much easier to talk about other people than it is ourselves, more so when those people are fictitious. But talking about those other people assuages our own fears and can be cathartic. Cather’s mirror in The Professor’s House shows the reader’s own feelings in an easier to talk about manner, laying bare a usual “sweep it under the rug” approach to the banality of life and instead encouraging the reader to embrace the bland.

At the outset of the novel, the professor, St. Peter, yearns for his former house. The family has just moved and yet he still keeps the house. As the reader finds out more about his current family life, the story is suddenly interrupted with the intrusion of an extended back flash. Tom Outland was very close with St. Peter and supposed to be his son-in-law. From St. Peter’s eyes, those times seem like the best of his life.

As the story closes, St. Peter wakes up to realize “the long anticipated coincidence had happened…the storm had blown the stove out and the window shut” such that the house was filling with gas. Aside from posing an interesting legal question if failing to actively save his own life creates culpability for of killing himself, his flirtation with death stuns the reader. How far must one travel down the road of memory to the point when the present seems futile?

Ultimately, St. Peter is saved by Augusta. She happened to come over during the storm and found him on the floor. She supposes he “must have got up and tried to get to the door before [he was] overcome” and passed out from the gas. Then, looking at Augusta, he realizes she lives life fully. Augusta “wasn’t at all afraid to say things that were heavily, drearily true … [after assisting with deaths and funerals] her manner of speaking about it made death seem less uncomfortable”, less frightening. There is a truth about her missing from the professor.

When he realizes why Augusta comforts him, he realizes what he lacks from his own life: namely, life. St. Peter “never learned to live without delight” since he always searches for happiness. But life is not wholly happy. It can be, but that is not the truth of life. Finally it “occurred to him that he might have to live” without the façade of delight, but the truth of what is under that façade as well. His conscious state, after surviving the incident with the gas, “had let something go--and it was gone: something very precious, that he could not consciously have relinquished, probably”. As he reflects on his brush with death, St. Peter’s conscious catches up with his subconscious, allowing him to live completely. The deepest part of him, the part he lacked access to, knew life retained value even after the glamour fades and the best years are behind. Therefore he subconsciously got up from the chair to save himself and live.

The book celebrates all of life. Cather implores the reader to embrace the mundane aspects of life, as well as the good. Living like an ostrich who keeps his head in the ground is not good enough. It is the less liked parts of life that make life good. Though this book may be about accepting the minutiae and normal domestic rituals, the reader cannot overlook the deep nostalgia in its pages when the professor recalls the past. Therefore, to pair the mundane and nostalgia, the book is an exhortation to enjoy everything. The bad exists to emphasize the good while the good uplifts from the bad. Instead of just being born back ceaselessly to the past by memory, as Fitzgerald wirtes, his boat is finally able to “beat on” to life, in its entirety.