Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady at One Hundred

It was a fall Saturday in New York City the mid-1970s. I was a college student working part-time at Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth Street. I hated the job. My boss was a bully, and my math anxiety kicked in every time I had to make change at the old pre-electronic cash register. But far beyond those troubles was the fact that, like Paul in Willa Cather’s stunning 1905 short story, “Paul’s Case,” I wanted to live in Art. Any time spent straightening up displays of flannel shirts in the dim “Husky Boys” department of Macy’s—instead of reading James Joyce or T. S. Eliot—was time wasted. And like Paul, I must have been insufferable.