Passage of Time in The Professor's House

In class today, we discussed how Willa Cather used images to pass time in the novel as opposed to other examples. In earlier novels that we read, the characters were just described as waiting around as in the case of The Ox-Bow Incident, making it seem as though time were passing in real time. On page 195 in The Professor's House, after the burial of Henry, Father Duchene stays with the family for a week to provide support and comfort. Cather describes him as one day cutting "down one of the old cedars that grew exactly in the middle of the deep trail worn in the stone, and counted the rings under his pocket microscope" (195). Cather uses this image to describe the passage of time, but also to symbolize death and remembrance for Henry. Father Duchene looks at the rings in the tree, counting to three hundred thirty six, looking back at all the memories of Henry's life.