The Devil's Work is Abstraction

The Devil’s work is abstraction—not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities—which, of course, is why “David’s heart smote him after he had numbered the people” (2 Samuel 24:10). It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the “acceptability” of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield. The true lover of material things does not think in this way, but is answerable instead to the paradox of the parable of the lost sheep: that each is more precious than all.

-Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, 279.

John 3:16

And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 254.

Prayer

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.

But sometimes a prayer comes that you have not thought to pray, yet suddenly there it is and you pray it. Sometimes you just trustfully and easily pass into the other world of sleep. Sometimes the bird finds that what looks like an opening is an opening, and it flies away. Sometimes the shut door opens and you go through it into the same world you were in before, in which you belong as you did not before.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 253.

Past and Present

You work your way down, or not so much down as within, into the interior of the present, until finally you come to that beginning in which all things, the world and the light itself, at a word welled up into being out of their absence. And nothing is here that we are beyond the reach of merely because we do not know about it. It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with reminders of Itself.

-Wendell Berry, Fidelity, 4-5. 

Brotherly Love

"Wheeler, do you know why we've been friends?"

"I've thought so," Wheeler says. He has thought so because of that company of friends to which they both belong, which has been so largely the pleasure and meaning of both their lives. "But why?"

"Because we ain't been brothers."

"What are you talking about?" Wheeler says.

But he is afraid he knows, and his discomfort is apparent to them all...

"If we'd been brothers, you wouldn't have put up with me. Or anyhow you partly wouldn't have, because a lot of my doings haven't been your kind of doings. As it was, they could be tolerable or even funny to you because they wasn't done close enough to you to matter. You could laugh...

"Wheeler, if we're going to get this will made out, not to mention all else we've got to do while there's breath in us, I think you've got to forgive me as if I was a brother to you." He laughs, asserting for the last time the seniority now indisputably his, and casting it aside. "And I reckon I've got to forgive you for taking so long to do it."

-Wendell Berry, That Distant Land, 362-363.

The Line of Succession

"I mean you're a man indebted to a dead man. So am I. So was he. That's the story of it. Back of you is Jack Beechum. Back of him was Ben Feltner. Back of him was, I think, his own daddy. And back of him was somebody else, and on back that way, who knows how far? And I'm back of you because Jack Beechum is, and because he's back of me, along with some others. It's no use to want to make it on your own, because you can't..."

Elton laughs. "The line of succession I'm in says you've got to make it on your own. I'm in the line of succession of root, hog, or die."

"That may have been the line of succession you were in, but it's not the one you're in now. The one you're in now is different."

"Well, how did I get in it?" Elton says almost in a sigh, as if longing to be out of it.

"The way you got in it, I guess, was by being chosen. The way you stay in it is by choice."

-Wendell Berry, That Distant Land, 284.

A Life Well Lived

The great question for the old and dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.

-Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett, 120.

Now, Now and Now and Now

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.

-Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 148.

A Better Place

Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned form his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world.

-Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 83.

A Story is Not a Life

A story, I see, is not a life. A story must follow a line; the telling must begin and end. A life, on the contrary, would be impossible to fix in time, for it does not begin within itself, and it does not end.

-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 149.

Memories

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.

Review: Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry

I saved this review for last because it was, by far, the best of my library books. I already wrote up a description for a friend, so I am going to cut and paste from the email I sent to her (with just a little editing)...

Jayber Crow is the fictional autobiography of Jonah (Jayber) Crow. He's born in the teens, and is looking back on his life as an old man in the eighties. He spends most of his life in a small town in Kentucky, and a good part of the book is about that small town and the people who live in it. It's a gentle book, and the characters are painted with grace and warmth, and that's what I liked best. There were several places where I laughed out loud. But there are profound passages too, some of which I've already quoted in my blog. It seems like a good book for someone making life decisions, or for someone who is just interested in vocation (like me).

Vocation, and the role of individual choice (self-determination?) is one of Berry's themes. He is also critical of many of the cultural changes that occurred over the course of the twentieth century, and this book mourns the passing of rural farming communities. I have a harder time embracing this theme—I tend to think that that the state of the world is neither improving nor disintegrating, just carrying on much the same as always. But Berry challenges that assumption, and perhaps it ought to be challenged. I disdain cultural relativism, and it strikes me now that I'm just expressing a sort of temporal relativism. Perhaps some ages are darker than others. And while nostalgia can be a bit of a sickness, it is appropriate to name and mourn what's lost.

I'll leave it at that, except to say that this book reminded me a bit of both Our Town and Theophilus North—so I guess Berry's prose has a Thornton Wilderish quality. A fine book. Check it out!

Carried Along...

I can't look back from where I am now and feel that I have been very much in charge of my life. Certainly I have lived on the edge of the Port William community, and I am farther than ever out on the edge of it now. But I feel that I have lived on the edge even of my own life. I have made plans enough, but I see now that I have never lived by plan. Any more than if I had been a bystander watching me live my life, I don't feel that I ever have been quite sure what was going on. Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. All the important things have happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 322.

Sermons

In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 162

Wandering

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past apppropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 133.