Wendell Berry: A man who is depending on the truth to console him is in a hell of a fix.

I am so smitten with Wendell Berry's writing after having read A Place on Earth, Nathan Coulter, and just a few days ago The Memory of Old Jack.

Here are a few snippets from A Place on Earth and from The Memory of Old Jack--

[Gideon Crop is a farmer working the land of one Roger Merchant, a reprobate.]

To Gideon Crop, standing in front of the barn in weather that has been wet for days, the clouds so low now that they snag and unravel against the wooded bluffs on each side of the valley, it seems that he is still just barely ahead of his circumstances. He is thirty-seven years old, and in the years of his manhood be has held tight, and come out finally a little ahead of where he was when he began. Not much, but a noticeable little. That is how he is able to see it in his good moods. In the bad weather of his mind it can seem to him just as undeniable that the settled account of these years shows him falling behind. There is the money in the bank..., 

[Gideon is looking for his little daughter Annie in the storm and flood of the river.]

He goes up onto the mud and sits down and drains his boots. He is shaking hard now from head to foot, though, blunted with fatigue as he is, he cannot determine the location of his misery, does not know if it is in his mind or in his body. Sitting on the mud, he can hear himself moaning at the end of every breath, and an old knowledge out of childhood tells him that he is trying not to cry. His clothes feel so heavy he cannot imagine that he will get up again. 

It is as though his mind, which like his body has begun to work apart from his will, is gambling that absurdity will be more bearable than reasonableness. 

[Mat Feltner, a farmer, head of his family, one of the main characters, one of the most brilliantly written characters.]

This new work must be done for the sake of the land itself--and for the sake of no one he can foresee, some one who will come later, who will depend then on what is done now. 

[Wheeler Catlett is a farmer-lawyer, and Mat Feltner's son-in-law.This is what he has to say.]

It is just the truth. And a man who is depending on the truth to console him is sometimes in a hell of a fix.

[Here we have Old Jack Beechum, a wonderful, expansive, ascendant character.  He is in conversation with a young man who is farming Old Jack's land. He is Elton Penn.]

They talk briefly about the weather and about the prospects for the crops. Old jack asks a question or two, and the young man answers. He is a lean, hard-muscled fellow, clean-cut, with the curious ability to look neat in dirty work clothes. Respectfully and good-humoredly he fulfills what he considers to be his duty to his landlord, explaining what he has and how he has done it and what he plans to do and what his thoughts are about the work of the farm. And beneath the pleasantness with which he does this explaining can be felt his confidence in his own work and his own judgment. A good head. Old Jack gets the impression that his opinions and approval are not being asked for, and instead of being angered by the young man's independence as he would have expected, he finds that he is delighted. It is a meeting of two of the same kind. While he was taking the measure of the younger man, his own measure has been taken. That tickles him. When his last question has been answered, he raises his hand. 

"You go right ahead. Satisfy yourself, and you'll satisfy me." 

Old Jack never said that to anybody before. He looks at the young man, wondering if he understands, and sees that he does.

[Because of his loveless marriage, Old Jack, when he was a younger Jack Beechum, has entered into an affair with Rose McGinnis, a young widow.]

The town talked and looked askance, and waited eagerly for more news out of that dark and fragrant garden from which it felt itself in exile.  And so this coupling went into the town’s mind, to belong to its history and its hope, even against its will.  Even as the knowledge of it fades, it remains, an inflection of the heart, troubling and consoling the night watches of lonely husbands and wives like a phrase from a forgotten song.

He would care for Rose.  …He would care for the night’s coming, and for the light that his desire cast around him, and for his arrival at the door, and for their talk and laughter falling to silence.  And for nothing beyond the reach and touch outside itself, she had so imparadised his mind.  She so received and welcomed him, and made him such delight, that it seemed to him his very life struggle and broke free and passed into her….   [Did you notice the word "imparadised"?  Berry is using paradise as a verb of action.  I love that.]

[From the beginning pages of The Memory of Old Jack]

Old Jack has become a worry to them.  In the last several weeks his mind seems to have begun to fail.  …And they have watched him, those who care about him, because they feel that he is going away from them, going into the past that now holds nearly all of him.  And they yearn toward him, knowing that they will be changed when he is gone.

[18-year-old Andy Catlett, Old Jack’s great-great grand nephew (Mat Feltner’s grandson) remembering a moment when he was a little boy.  He’s reflecting on the working men, Mat Feltner, Joe Banion, and his uncle Virgil (then a young man)] 

They came down on a wagon drawn by a team of mules, one black and one, in her old age, nearly as white as snow.  He remembers the early morning sunlight slanting in, the dew shining, the hummingbirds at the tobacco blooms, the solemn quiet of the woods. The clarity of that morning hour and the freshness of his eyes mythified the place, so that now it seems to him that he came there first, not fifteen years ago, but generations ago beyond memory--that when mat and Joe and Virgil brought him there it was not new to him, but more familiar than his own flesh, and the place and the hour held him like his mother’s lap.

Photo credits from top to bottom: John Eddy; Floodlist[dot]com; Chuck Redman; John Eddy; Kentucky New Era; Mississippi Dept of Archives & History.