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

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."

A Practiced Drunk

"They watch him pass in front of the most distant of the houses and come slowly down the row of them toward town, his walk a little unsteady but neither awkward nor faltering; he never strays out of his direction.  It is the gait of a man intricately skilled and practiced in being drunk. There is a ponderous grace about it like that of a trained elephant or a locomotive.  He sways heavily back and forth across the line of his direction, like a man carrying a barrel across a tightrope, his progress a sequence of fine distinctions between standing up and falling down.  His drunkenness has become precise."

--A Place on Earth, Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things

 The Peace of Wild Things

by: Wendell Berry 

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry - The Real Deal

Every now and then I operate under the delusion that I am a writer.  And then I go and read Wendell Berry and I am immediately divested of my delusion of grandeur.  This is one of many, many passages in Hannah Coulter that struck me as particularly wise and beautiful.  There were dozens and dozens of descriptions of the ordinary that gripped and drowned me in a whirlpool of longing and sadness and beauty and joy. 

"You think winter will never end, and then,when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and  a different light.  Under the bare trees the wildflowers bloom so thick you can't walk without stepping on them.  The pastures turn green and the leaves come.

You look around presently, and it is summer.  It has been dry a while, maybe, and now it has rained.  The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand.  Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflies that fly up in a flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail. 

And then it is fall and the cornfields are ripe and the calves are fat and shiny and the wooded valley sides are beautiful with color.  The sun is bright, the air clear, and the shadows dark.  There is the feeling of completion and storing up and getting ready.

You have consented to time and it is winter.  The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees.  There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet.  The house holds warmth.  A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white.  For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful.  You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was.  But you can't remember it the way it was.  To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening.  It can only return by surprise.  Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now, and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence."  --Hannah Coulter