Patria: A Few Fields in Greece, or Perhaps Kirksville

Going to college at Truman means living in rural Kirksville, Missouri. This was something that was always in the “con” column when I was deciding where to go last year. I had wanted to live for a while one of America’s big cities, to feed off the energy of a vibrant downtown area, like many of my friends from high school.

Kirksville’s downtown area is anything but vibrant. I explored it one day early in the semester, as the summer weather continued long past its due. A square surrounds the county courthouse, an impressive building that figured in a minor Civil War skirmish. There are a few restaurants, an independently-owned movie theater, a grocer, and a number of antique stores, the largest of which has three floors, with a small used bookshop on the top floor. The bookstore was a priority for me. A good, comfortable bookstore has always been something that I—well, I hesitate to say ‘need,’ but that’s my inclination. Being surrounded by books, most of which I have never read or seen before, in a quiet place with just a few other customers, is an environment I find rejuvenating for some reason.

I found a small classics section—a single bookshelf. The selection was thin but definitely interesting. The Beautiful and the Damned, Pilgrim’s Progress, Ulysses, and many other mysterious books I’ve never read. One in particular caught my eye—an old but mostly unworn copy of My Antonia. It snagged my attention first because it is one of my best friends’ favorite books, but also because I thought the cover was dully designed, overly pastoral, and sentimental. Which wasn’t too different from what I then thought of Kirksville. I bought the book in the hope that it would help me reconcile myself to where I was.

I ended up immensely enjoying the book—its slow storytelling place, the richly developed characters, its careful, loving attention to the red prairie grass and the way the Nebraska sunsets turned farming machinery into mysteriously portentous silhouettes. I even grew to love the cover, an old painting of a wheat harvest, pastel-hued and irretrievably dated, but beautiful all the same.

One of the most important parts of the book for me was Jim’s realization, while reading Virgil, of what was meant by the line “Primus ego in patriam mecum … deducam Musas” (“for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.”) I thought this line sounded very high-minded, but the Jim’s professor explained

“that ‘patria’ here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little ‘country’; to his father’s fields, ‘sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.’”

Jim goes on to speculate about his professor’s “country” as well.

“We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric [the professor] intimately enough to guess what that feeling was … I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric’s patria.”

I found the idea of the patria very interesting. For Jim, patria is his adopted home of the Nebraska fields. More importantly, patria is Antonia and the other “hired girls” he grew up with—the group of brawny, ambitious immigrant women that took up traditionally masculine jobs to secure the futures of their families and themselves. Though looked down upon by the prim townsfolk, they ultimately became the most successful of anyone from the town or surrounding farms.

For me, patria was the thick woods and streams around my house, our camping-themed family room, the cupboard-sized newspaper office in my high school, my friends’ houses. Patria was my family and the friends I made in high school. And it still is those things and those people. But for the next several years my country will also be this dusty old northern Missouri town and its college. What and who will I find in this place?