Thoughts of Jim Burden in “My Ántonia”, by Willa Cather

“I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin… All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines…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 a 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.”