Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (New Mexico)

This novel is so different from "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse;" it was a shame that the latter book kept intruding as I read Cather's charming story. The sense of dedication to religion is so much more sincere, and there is honest respect and understanding for the indigenous people rather than caricature and ridicule, and the landscape stands out in stark relief.

My favorite sections dealing with these three interlocked themes are:
* How the (then) Bishop deals with Martinez and his justification of not practicing celibacy based on his tortured interpretation of St. Augustine.
* Father Latour's description of the Navajo -- "just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like a fish through the water, or birds through the air."
* The Bishop remembering his first glimpse of the mesas and how the clouds mirrored them, as smoke is part of the censer.

New Mexico physically and culturally is grafted on to the Bishop and his approach to living his life. When the French architect, Molny, comments on the unfinished cathedral in Santa Fe, saying, "Setting is accident. Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger." Before that comment, Cather describes the church as leaping out of the mountain with its dark pines and carnelian rocks. But this is so close to death coming for the archbishop, that it comes to mean how he can to blend into his surroundings and leave his mark was not a European (cathedral) memorial, but as a Native American pueblo.