I'm Gretchen Rubin, and this is a little happier.

Whenever I feel sorrow or despair, I return to my favorite passages from literature.

There are pages that I've read and re-read dozens of times.

One of my favorite passages, one that always brings me comfort, is from Willa Cather's brilliant 1913 novel,

O Pioneers. This passage describes an afternoon that the characters of Alexandra and

Emil Bergson, a sister and brother, spend together in the farm country of Nebraska, around 1900.

There were certain days in her life,

outwardly uneventful, which Alexandra remembered as peculiarly happy, days when she was close to the flat, fallow world about her, and felt, as it were, in her own body, the joyous germination in the soil. There were days,

too, which she and Emile had spent together, upon which she loved to look back. There had been such a day

when they were down on the river in the dry year, looking over the land. They had made an early start

one morning and had driven a long way before

noon. When a meal said he was hungry, they drew back from the road, gave Brigham his oats among the

bushes, and climbed up to the top of a grassy bluff to eat their lunch under the shade of some

little elm trees. The river was clear there, and shallow, since there had been no rain, and it ran in

ripples over the sparkling sand. Under the overhanging willows of the opposite bank, there was an

inlet where the water was deeper and flowed so slowly that it seemed to sleep in the sun.

In this little bay, a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening

her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time,

watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck.

A meal must have felt about it as she did. For afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes

to say, Sister, you know our duck down there? Alexander remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life.

Years afterwards, she thought of the duck as still there,

...