The Professor's House

“St. Peter had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense. He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust—many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well—but his misfortune was that he loved youth—he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant.”

St. Peter is devoted to his work and passionate about his students. But this passion for work also takes him away from his family. St. Peter has long been divided between work and family, which continues to be one of the central conflicts in his life. This quote also sets up St. Peter’s devotion to Tom, one of his students.

“A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly, just once, in his student Tom Outland,—and he had foretold.”

In this quote, Cather introduces the character of Tom as instrumental in St. Peter’s character development. Tom is described here as the embodiment of St. Peter’s values and beliefs in willpower and hard work.

“As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland.”

Cather emphasizes the significance of Tom on the characters in this novel. His profound impact on them outlives him. This quote highlights that St. Peter is still very much struggling with his loss.

“Nothing hurts me so much as to have any member of my family talk as if we had done something fine for that young man, brought him out, produced him. In a lifetime of teaching, I’ve encountered just one remarkable mind; but for that, I’d consider my good years largely wasted.”

St. Peter is characterized as being humble in the face of his memories of Tom’s brilliance. He takes no responsibility for Tom’s success, which further emphasizes his admiration of Tom, and the role Tom plays in St. Peter’s character development and ethos. Tom is a success story for St. Peter because of their proximity to one another.

“And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”

St. Peter takes stock of his life, his career, and his family and necessarily self-aggrandizes his role or his success. His proximity to Tom emphasizes the importance of St. Peter’s own life because his instinct is to make sure his life feels important. This quote also emphasizes the value Cather places on art and thinking.

“It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected and placed—it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection.”

This quote uses imagery to highlight St. Peter’s appreciation of natural beauty and art. Beauty and art makes St. Peter feel more at peace and alive than he is with most other people. This is a necessary balance to his life among other people and within the darkness of his scholarly retreats.

“The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one‘s own.”

Cather captures the natural isolation of the human being. Closeness between people has a limit and is often illusory because essentially, all human beings are alone within their own depths of feeling and thought.

“He was the sort of fellow who can do anything for somebody else, and nothing for himself. There are lots like that among working-men. They aren’t trained by success to a sort of systematic selfishness.”

Cather characterizes working men as separate from mainstream capitalistic selfishness. As opposed to people in the business or academic world, working men are helpful to one another and generous. This celebrates the working man and sets up a dichotomy between social classes.

“He said if I once knew Latin, I wouldn’t have to work with my back all my life like a burro. He had great respect for education, but he believed it was some kind of hocus-pocus that enabled a man to live without work.”

Tom is the middleman between the cerebral academic world and the world of the working man. He is acquainted with both manual labor and books. This quote poses a challenge to St. Peter’s self-conception and calls into question the value of his life and work.

“The mesa was our only neighbour, and the closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was. It was no longer a blue, featureless lump, as it had been from a distance.”

The Blue Mesa is a symbol of potential. This quote captures the seduction of a landmark that is stronger, more beautiful, and more long-lasting than human civilization.

“Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot.”

This quote celebrates the accomplishment and resilience of the human race. Being victorious over the awesome power of nature highlights the ingenuity of human beings. Specifically, this quote celebrates the creativity and hard work of the Indigenous people who established themselves in an unforgiving landscape.

“How it did use to depress me to see all the hundreds of clerks come pouring out of that big building at sunset! Their lives seemed to me so petty, so slavish.”

Tom stands out as a character because he doesn’t succumb to certain societal pressures. He has an unconventional life and refuses to change himself to maintain the status quo. This quote is both characteristic of Tom’s special quality and Cather’s criticism of society’s values.

“I had never told him just how I felt about those things we’d dug out together, it was the kind of thing one doesn’t talk about directly. But he must have known; he couldn’t have lived with me all summer and fall without knowing. And yet, until that night, I had never known myself that I cared more about them than about anything else in the world.”

This quote characterizes Tom as someone who cares deeply for culture and history. Tom is vulnerable and is not ashamed of his feelings. Tom’s concern for his findings on the Blue Mesa highlights his values.

“Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one. For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion.”

Cather captures the joy of making an incredible discovery. Tom undergoes a unique experience unearthing a past civilization. Tom’s connection to his discovery is like a religious emotion, which highlights his appreciation for the lost civilization and honors the value of human society against the odds.

“Happiness is something one can’t explain. You must take my word for it. Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue, a life in itself.”

Tom knows true happiness because of his discovery and the work he puts into the preservation of the village at Blue Mesa. He lives his fullest life by being one with nature and by protecting a lost culture.

“All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance.”

Despite St. Peter’s belief in willpower, he acknowledges that his life has been determined by a series of chance and that the decisions he has made have been in response to chance. This marks an important development in his character development.

“He wouldn’t choose to live his life over—he might not have such good luck again. He had had two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many years, and a second of the mind—of the imagination. Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth.”

Cather marks a shift in St. Peter’s characterization. He realizes and appreciates his dual life, that of the heart and of the mind. Tom was a formative character in St. Peter’s life because his zest for life re-inspired the passion St. Peter once had. Without Tom, St. Peter returns to feeling that he has lost inspiration and joy to age and domesticity.

“All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion. When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth.”

As part of his character development, St. Peter experiences a new sense of life. By living in peace, he discovers a new layer of life in which he can be both satiated and stimulated.

“But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning.”

In this moment of character development, St. Peter revisits his childhood self and comes to terms with the fact that no one can be as happy as they were when they were children. The “chain of events which had happened to him” are external from who he truly is. The essence of his personhood lies in his childhood love for nature.

“What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world.”

St. Peter is surprised that he can feel so aligned with his childhood self. This highlights the cyclical nature of life. As an older man, St. Peter returns to his childhood self because he his childhood self is at the opposite spectrum of the cycle of his life. Cather’s message through this character development is that life is essentially recursive, and we don’t fundamentally change at the core of who we are.

“The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea.”

This quote emphasizes St. Peter’s existential crisis. In reconnecting with his childhood self and coming to terms with the absence of childlike joy in his life, St. Peter reaches the conclusion that he will die soon. While this doesn’t end up being true, it’s indicative of St. Peter’s state of mind.

“But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth.”

As part of his character development, St. Peter accepts his mortality and changes his perception about life and death. This quote also emphasizes how deep St. Peter’s aversion is to obligations and responsibilities.

“Augusta was like the taste of bitter herbs; she was the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from,—yet when he had to face it, he found that it wasn’t altogether repugnant.”

Augusta represents another type of life, another style of living. She is in many ways juxtaposed to the lifestyle of St. Peter’s family. And yet, Augusta is a source of comfort for St. Peter. In her difference, she highlights that life doesn’t have to be one version of a story. Augusta also nurtures St. Peter and enables him to live his solitary life in their shared study. She is therefore important to his character development.