The Beatryce Prophecy

"Answelica was a goat with teeth that were the mirror of her soul -- large, sharp, and uncompromising." 

Thus begins Kate DiCamillo's 2021 story about young Beatryce.  What could possibly be more frightening than the goat who opens the story?  A strong willed girl who can read and write, that's what.  Only Beatryce's unlikely companions - among them the goat, an illiterate orphan, and a monk with a wobbly eye - recognize that these gifts were given her to fulfill her destiny. 

"What is it to know that people will come searching for you?  Everything."  This is Beatryce's hope as she waits in the dark to be led to where she belongs...to her home.

Another heartwarming novel from DiCamillo, weaving together suspense, delight, and laughter while introducing young readers to words like "benign," "antipathies," "beatific," and "prodigious."

A worthwhile read.

Turns of Phrase

From The Memory of Old Jack - another Port William tale full of beauty and sorrow - come these turns of phrase as only Wendell Berry can spin:

"And always near him was the thought of the dead woman who had loved him as he was and of the living one who could not."

"It is the blessing and trial of his old age that his mind goes back to inhabit again and again the body of the man he was."

"He was her cross, and she bore him with a submission that, afterwards, chilled him to the bone." 

"His labor is no longer work, but a striving against the effrontery of circumstance."

"Lying in the bare room whose curtainless windows admitted the bright, implacable gaze of the stars, he knew that he had become the incarnation of his solitude."

Again, they must resume their journey, the long return of dust to dust."

"She wants what she cannot ask and he cannot give.  He sees it in her eyes.  It makes a sorrow in him that only his grave will heal."

"He became again the true husband of his land, but now  his work was healing."

"She had made of herself a sort of portable occasion for the ostentatious gifts of her husband."

"The cost of living beyond his time is putting up with the various noises and contraptions of these new times."

"Now he must cease to be a son to the old men and become a father to the young." 

The Pained Underside of Severity

Mat Feltner: "I think of the pain I've given to my children.  Especially to Virgil.  You hope for a realization in them, finally, that the pain is given out of love, inept and blundering and blind and wrong as it can sometimes be, I don't worry so much about Bess.  She's had a family of her own long enough to know the terrified love you can sometimes have for your children.  But Virgil I feel like I owe an accounting to.  There's maybe only weakness in it.  You want your good intentions recognized, even the failed ones.  You want it known by the ones nearest you that your good intentions are a real part of your life, and your love for them." 

Hannah studied his face, seeing in it an old man's sorrow for the imperfection of his life and fatherhood. She understands suddenly how a young man might be borne up, might justify everything, by the hope of perfection - and growing old, must realize that he has done nothing perfect.  She knows that Mat has allowed her to see, as Virgil never was allowed to, the pained underside of his severity.  

--A Place on Earth, Wendell Berry