Desire in The Professor's House

"Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement"(19).

St. Peter thinks this as he thinks on his classes and what it takes to succeed, "A man can do anything if he wishes to enough," he thinks to himself (19). According to him, there has been only one person to pass through his life that he could measure this is: Tom Outland. I say pass through his life because Cather says he could measure it, "roughly, just once"(20) without any indication whether that was in his class or outside of it. With that in mind, we are left to assume that the Professor has been able to measure this sort of desire in Tom and no one else. But desire is present in other parts of the novel, Rosie and Louie have the desire to build a house that they dedicate (kind of) to Tom, the Professor's desires result in his literary works; these are but two instances, but neither suffice for the Professor to consider. I believe the Professor is trying to purify what desire means here, referencing it as a motivator for bettering the self, like Tom did with academics, rather than for financial gain. St. Peter could measure the desire in Tom to become a better person and that is what can spark achievement, not a desire to increase one's holdings.