A Place on Earth

Wendell Berry's powers of observation and his ability to capture essence with unparalleled economy - of a person, an event, a landscape, a community, an experience, a photograph -  remains unmatched.  Here's a tiny sampling from the 300+ pages of A Place on Earth:

Jarrat Coulter - "It is a severe manhood that Jarrat has, that feeds on its loneliness, and will be governed by no head but its own."

Uncle Jack - "He relishes his ciphering.  The figures come into his mind smelling of barns and grain bins and tobacco and livestock.  His figures grunt and bleat and bray and bawl.  This is the passion that has worn him out and made him old, and is still a passion.  As he labor over it, the notebook becomes as substantial in his hands as a loaded shovel."

Mat Feltner - "This is the crisis of increase - what he was born to, and what he chose.  When he has done all that can be done, he is at peace with himself.   His labor has been his necessity and his desire."

Brother Preston - "The Word, in his speaking it, fails to be made flesh.  It is a failure particularized for him in the palm of every work-stiffened hand held out to him at the church door every Sunday morning - the hard dark hand taking his pale unworn one in a gesture of politeness without understanding."

Gideon Crop - "There is evidence everywhere of the presence of a strong, frugal intelligence, the sort of mind that can make do, not meagerly but skillfully and adequately, with scraps. He had the gifts of quiet endurance, of tolerance of rough work and poor tools, of makeshift, of neatness in patched clothes, of thrift."

Aunt Fanny - "That these things have grown out of the ground into their secret places apart from anybody's intention, and that she takes them familiarly and freely without attempting to take them all, that they are the harvest of a ramble and not a search or a labor, all this bespeaks a peaceableness between her and the world."

Roger - "Roger is lying on the big four-poster bed, wearing shirt and tie and coat and hat, generously covered with quilts, his head propped up against the bare headboard - sound asleep, his bottle propped beside him, a large briar pipe lying extinguished on his chest.  That he has escaped burning up is owed, according to some, only to the Lord's noted solicitude for drunkards and fools."