The Alembic of Art of My Antonia The Alembic of Art is the chapter of My Antonia The Road Home that will be discussed. This chapter suggests that Willa Cather uses references from the arts in creating the novel My Antonia. Much of Willa Cather's background came from her childhood in Nebraska. It even uprooted the character Annie Sadilek, from Red Cloud, a town Cather lived in during her adolescence ("Classic Notes", 1). Despite her background, John J. Murphy believes "My Antonia is a novel in which vision and arrangement create character" (Murphy, 37) and Cather created this by using inspiration from such things as the Bible and paintings. There are many specific and non-specific biblical borrowings and echoes in the novel, My Antonia. One example is when Grandfather Burden reads from the Bible, first from Psalm 47 and then the first two chapters from Matthew, the account of Christ's birth. Then when the Burdens go to the Shimerdas after the suicide "they looked very biblical as they set off" (Cather, 100). The Christmas Story of Matthew and Luke echoes in Widow Steaven's account of the birth of Antonia's child. Also, Jim's goodbye scene with Antonia, illuminated by the sun and moon, reflects Revelation 12:1. "Cather's biblical subtext is an unusual one for an American western in that it incorporates Antonia's Catholic tradition and Jim's Protestant one to make events notable" (Murphy, 40). Murphy also suggests that Cather was influenced by paintings that she saw while visiting Barbizon in 1902. Many of the paintings Cather saw were reminiscences of Nebraska in the primitive huts of mud and stone, wheat fields, and peasant women. Cather associates Antonia with the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet. These paintings often contained "women who looked old and battered, who were bent and slow and not food for much else. Such brave old faces as most of these field-working women have, such blithe songs they hum, and such good-humored remarks they bawl at a girl who sees too much of one particular reaper. There is something worth thinking about in these brown, merry old women, who have brought up fourteen children and can outstrip their own sons and grandsons in the harvest field, lay down their rake and write a traveler directions as to how he can reach the next town in a hand as neat as a bookkeeper's. As the sun dropped lower, the merriment ceased, the women were tired and grew to look more and more as Millet painted them, warped and bowed and heavy" (Murphy 45). Millet certainly contributes to Jim's view of Antonia during several scenes in the novel. At first he says, " her eyes are big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich dark color. Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking" (Cather, 23). Millet's influence is also strong later in the novel when Jim describes Antonia as, " a battered woman now but she still had something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by the look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last" (353). These paintings Cather saw obviously set her mind to the way women were and obviously had a great impact on her. Reading the critical analysis gave me a new perspective on My Antonia. I always enjoy seeing how others interpret literature, and John J. Murphy's interpretation was very enlightening. I could see some of the biblical references while reading the novel, but I never would have know about the influence from Millet's paintings. Knowing all this extra information makes the novel so much more interesting to me.
Black holes are thought to be a portal to another dimension or a way for time to slip. Mainly all these theories follow the laws of physics and do not cross any illogical possibilities. For a way in which we can achieve any of these would be through many more years of research. If even physically possible for any of these hypotheses to coexist with one another. Learning that there’s a possible way for black holes to allow time to lapse or elapse. The study has been a challenge, finding ways in which these ideas could work. Theories about space time are not always true, but they allow us to have an improved understanding towards the, what ifs.
"The roof was caving in and I thought I was going to die. It was like
There is evidence that supports the hypothesis that the Milky Way Galaxy has a massive black hole at its core. At the center of our very own galaxy is a mysterious source of energy. Vast amounts of radiation pour from this compact source which may be a Supermassive Black Hole. Astronomers found an intense radio source with strings of other radio sources clustered about it in the direction of the galactic center. The intense source was named Sagittarius A because the center of the galaxy lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. The position of Sagittarius A as has been observed through radio telescopes around the world seems to be very near the dynamical and gravitational center of the galaxy. Based on its high luminosity and radio spectrum Sagittarius A is neither a star nor a pulsar. It has a luminosity of 5 stars but is smaller than our solar system. Also, it can’t be a supernova remnant since it is not expanding. The strongest evidence that it is a Supermassive Black Hole come...
Black holes were originally thought to have only mere mathematical concepts. There was seemingly no possible way to compress any object into a space small enough to equal to its schwarzschild radius. Later however, astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that stars much larger than our own sun should theoretically be able to collapse into a black hole (UTFC). A star is like a blown up balloon with the force of gravity trying to compress the balloon inwards and the air trying to push the balloon outwards. Likewise, stars are held in balance by gravity trying to collapse the star inwards going against the outwards pressure of the internal reactions of the star called nuclear fusion. If the star is big enough and the pressure inside quickly disappears, gravity would and should slingshot the star into a tiny point with near infinite density with an extremely strong gravitatio...
The origins of the super-massive black holes which concludes how they were formed and what caused them to form is an unsolved problem which is yet a mystery of astrophysics. ( Millis 2014)
Stars explode at the end of their lifetime, sometimes when they explode the stars leave a remnant of gasses and, dust behind. What the gasses come together to form depend on the size of the remnant. If the remnant is less than 1.4 solar masses it will become a white dwarf, a hot dead star that is not bright enough to shine. If the remnant is roughly 1.4 solar masses, it will collapse. “The protons and electrons will be squashed together, and their elementary particles will recombine to form neutrons”. What results from this reaction is called a neut...
Randall III, John H. "Intrepretation of My Antonia." Willa Cather and Her Critics. Ed. James Schroeter. New York: Cornell University Press, 1967. 272-323.
Stars are born in the interstellar clouds of gas and dust called nebulae that are primarily found in the spiral arms of galaxies. These clouds are composed mainly of hydrogen gas but also contain carbon, oxygen and various other elements, but we will see that the carbon and oxygen play a crucial role in star formation so they get special mention. A nebula by itself is not enough to form a star however, and it requires the assistance of some outside force. A close passing star or a shock wave from a supernova or some other event can have just the needed effect. It is the same idea as having a number of marbles on a trampoline and then rolling a larger ball through the middle of them or around the edges. The marbles will conglomerate around the path of the ball, and as more marbles clump together, still more will be attracted. This is essentially what happens during the formation of a star (Stellar Birth, 2004).
The birth of a star is a process completely fueled by gravity (“Life”). All stars are born in something called a nebula, which is essentially just a cloud of gas and dust. Dr. Michelle Thaller, stated on the documentary How The Universe Works, “All you need to make a star is hydrogen, gravity, and time.” The clouds of gas and dust start to churn rapidly, causing clumps of matter to form. Once the correct mass is reached, they condense under their own gravitational pull and heat up. This clump of matter is known as a protostar (“Stars”). As time progresses, the cloud thickens and starts to spin, a stage that can take hundreds of thousands of years. Gravity will then start to crush the matter into a very hot and dense sphere. Eventually, the pressure that gravity applies upon the sphere causes jets of hot gas to extend out into space. This pressure also causes the star to consume more gas and matter, which only accelerates the heat up process. At the temperature of fifteen million degrees, atoms of gas fuse together, releasing energy, and activating the star (“Extreme”). However, this is not always the case. If a clump of ma...
Smaller stars will ultimately collapse under their weight and their centers will start to behave as a solid. Astronomers refer to these stars as white dwarfs. White dwarfs are so dense that if it were possible to stand on them you would weigh one million times more than on earth. Massive stars take a very different much more aggressive path when they die. One of two things will happen when a massive stars core it will jump right through the white dwarf stage and produce a neutron star or a black hole. Both of these are very bizarre space bodies. Neutron stars will cause electrons to join with protons and become part of the nucleus. This eliminates any space left in the atom. Alternatively a massive star may become a black hole. The gravity in a black hole is so powerful that not even light escapes. Black holes are still very mysterious to us and are a major point of interest for the astronomy
The name “black hole” created by John Wheeler in the 1960’s was to, “describe what happens when matter is piled into an infinitely dense point in space-time” (Minkel) The overwhelming pull of gravity can repel to matter, by collapsing in on itself. There will then lead to a point of no return to the black hole, which is the most feared object in the universe.
A star will blow up with the help of gravitational collapses. When a star explodes from nuclear fusion it is because so much mass has built up within its core and it cannot hold the weight. Neutrons are the only things in nature that can stop a core implosion. When a white dwarf suffers a supernova, the energy comes from the runaway fusion of carbon and oxygen in the core.
...e could start accreting matter and eventually grow into a supermassive one. A third possibility is that supermassive black holes grow from a cluster of smaller black holes that merge."(Bell, Trudy E.) "The bigger the galaxy, it seems, the bigger the black hole."(Dunn, Marcia)
It is not understood well, but in some supernovae the gravity is so intense within the red supergiant that the electrons are forced into the atomic nuclei where they combine with protons to form neutrons. The electromagnetic forces keeping apart the seperate nuclei are gone and the entire core becomes a dense ball of neutrons or an atomic nucleus about the size of Manhatten called a Neutron Star. If the mass is great enough though, when the star turns into a red supergiant it will collapse under its on gravity into a radius smaller than the Schwarzchild Radius and turn into a Black Hole.
A Black Hole is a compact/ localised region of space surrounding a collapsed mass within which gravity is so powerful that neither matter nor radiation can escape – in other words, the escape velocity (see page 3) exceeds the velocity of light.