My memories of Uncle Andrew are thus an accumulation of little pictures and episodes, isolated from one another, unbegun and unended. They are vividly colored, clear in outline, and spare, as if they belong to an early age of the world when there were not too many details. Each is like the illuminated capital of a page I cannot read, for in my memory there is no tissue of connection or interpretation. As a child, I either was interested or I was not; I either understood or I did not. Mostly, even when I was interested, I did not understand. I had perhaps no inclination to explain my elders to myself...Perhaps it was from thinking about [Uncle Andrew] after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us everyday, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.
-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 61-62.
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