If I were forced to read one thing only for the rest of my life, I would choose the fiction of Wendell Berry. There is no doubt about it. I have traveled around in his made-up world of Port William for a long time now, and I will have no trouble living there in my mind for a longer time to come. It moves me so.
Berry has been writing of the Port William Membership since 1960 with the publication of Nathan Coulter. Fifty-two years later, I found myself wandering around a favorite bookstore in Boone, North Carolina and happening upon his latest collection of stories from Port William, A Place in Time. Wendell Berry is now seventy-eight years old and it stands to reason that this could very well be his last book of the Membership, as the Port William community is known, though the quality of the work is certainly no indicator. In my own amateur opinion, it is some of his best ever. But, it does read as a benediction, particularly the last story, which lends its name to the entire collection. And there were times when I could not help but think I was reading a story that Berry felt he must get down before his time has come and gone, a sort of, Oh, yes, there was this, too, that I must not forget to tell about.
Just last night, while talking with my wife about the richness of this world Berry has brought forth, the long and detailed history of it that he has given us, I professed my amazement at its vastness. From where does such a wellspring come? It is obvious as you come to know these characters that Berry himself seems to see it all mostly through the eyes of Andy Catlett, whose own history resembles Berry's most closely and who is known by all as one of the rememberers in that community. I cannot help but wonder sometimes if Berry draws on his own story and on the stories of his family and neighbors. It really does not matter, of course, because Port William is altogether a real place of its own now. But, the sheer breadth of the tale Berry has for so long been spinning is mightily impressive and even more so to me if it comes solely from within himself. His character of Andy Catlett was born in 1934, which means he comes of age just at the crucial moment upon which Berry's larger story turns: the transition from the agrarian, pre-War economy to the post-War, industrial one. One world was ending and a new one was taking its place. Andy Catlett was born into the old one and lived to see it replaced, though he remains loyal to the old. As he says himself in the title story of this collection, "It is hard to remember one world while living in another."
This is part of what connects me most to fictional Port William. I see myself as an Andy Catlett. A few years ago I stood on a windy, fall day in a churchyard while the last of my grandmother's brothers was put into that ground for his final rest. He had been one of the real characters in my own life and I cannot help but think of him as I do Wendell Berry's Burley Coulter. "That Burley, now, he's in a class by hisself. There's stories about him that nobody's going to tell you . . . or anyhow I ain't, but I wish you could know him." I grieved for my great uncle on that day, of course, but he had lived a life long and full, in pure spite of the wildness of it. His funeral was occasion more to mark his long survival on this earth than his passing away from it. My grief, then, was larger for the passing away of something greater than one person. My grandmother, the youngest of her twelve siblings who were born over the span of more than twenty years at the beginning of the last century, remains now the last living of them. I have watched her stand stoic at many a funeral, but standing beside her as we listened to the preacher on that day, I felt the rattle of her sobbing, felt her lean into me for support. I think she, too, felt what I did. We knew we were witnessing the passing away of a people and a way of living the likes of which will not be known again in this world. It is a world, as Wendell Berry writes, that is "the old life of home farms and frugality and neighborhood and care-taking . . ."
This all begs a certain question, of course. Is it all about nostalgia, some sort of longing for simpler days gone by? I have thought much about this one troubling aspect of Berry's fictional world. Is it romanticized? Too idyllic and pastoral somehow? It is easy to feel this way at times. Everyone in Port William, on the surface at least, seems to be wise and loving and neighborly and calm. Part of this is the way Berry writes it. His words read like an elegy, a kind of prayer. Oh, but in Port William, too, there is certainly suffering and death, feuding and flaring tempers and so many sorrows and unanswered questions. There are drinkers, loners, adulterers, back-sliders and gamblers. And daily life turns around hard, blistering, back-crunching work. In the face of its tranquility, where most people still break open their fields behind a team of mules, it is as difficult a place as is any other. The long, long story of Port William, after all, is about the destruction of a world. There is no other way to put it. Even as Burley Coulter laughs and winks and tells us another story about a time he and Big Ellis and Jayber Crow got drunk, there is a sadness. We feel the impending doom, the slow, seeping loss of something larger than ourselves.
But, there is this: coursing its way through it all is grace. Strength in the face of hardship, elemental human kindness to match the troubles of this world, blessed reprieve in spite of the wearisome toil. And there is the place. Berry writes of a how a place continually tells the story of itself to itself. The members of the place are admitted freely into its conversation, lifted up and carried on it, but the conversation does not begin on human lips. While they are a part of it, though, all of them, the good and the bad, are members and neighbors among and to one another. Wendell Berry's story of Port William is the story of us. But, I do not think there is a sense of fatalism. I think, in the end, in Port William and in this other world, grace and redemption will somehow prevail. It may not be in a way we can imagine or that even includes us as we know ourselves, but the story will continue to tell itself.
11.29.2012
11.15.2012
DAUGHTER
I have read to our daughter since before she was born. In the last weeks of my wife's pregnancy, I would lie on the bed, rest my head near her belly and read to our child. I read Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays, High Tide in Tuscon. I read Tony Earley's Somehow Form a Family. My wife told me that the baby inside would quiet down and be still once I had started reading. I did it knowing that the child could even then hear my voice and not for any other reason than to get her used to the sound of it. After she was born, I read to her everyday. I came to know by memory The Big Red Barn and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, could likely still, if I tried, recite passages from them. It became a ritual, something we did after bath and before bed. I remember so many quiet evenings on the couch, the warmth of our daughter beside me, feeling the very shivering tension of her excitement and anticipation, the strength of her concentration.
Over the years we graduated up in our reading. I cannot recall the first chapter book we read, but since then we have literally read hundreds of books together. It has been one of the joys of my life to open up the world of reading to her. I will never forget the look on her face when I first guided her to the juvenile fiction section of our local library. She saw immediately the possibility of it all and grinned up at me. I read books with her that I loved as a child, The Incredible Journey and Where the Red Fern Grows and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. But we also read books together that I had not, books that I came to love as much as she did. Books by Kate DiCamillo became a favorite for us both and we read nearly all of The Boxcar Children. I will forever remember the months we spent reading the entire Chronicles of Narnia, a series our daughter loved so much that when we finally turned the last page of the seventh and final book, I asked her what we should read next and her answer, without hesitation, was to start again at the very beginning.
More and more we told relatives who asked for gift suggestions about books she wanted and, at some point, she came to own The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She longed to read it. I held off for a while, hesitant to bring into her consciousness the serious and weighty issues brought forth by that book. But I had mixed feelings about it, because it is also a penultimate book about the magic and freedom of childhood and I wanted to share with her the fun in reading it. So, I decided to be honest with her, explaining my hesitancy to read this particular book because of a certain word used over and over again, a word full of hate and ignorance that was spoken as part of the ordinary language of the time and not one that we should ever repeat in conversation. She patiently stopped my earnest and sincere lecture to let me know that she was already very well aware of the word. I could rest assured that she understood its gravity and the reasons it was not to be used in our own daily language. So, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became one the more memorable books we have read together and I was proud of the good and critical questions it prompted from her. It opened up for us many conversations about morality and truth and the hard complexities of being human that I do not think we would have otherwise had. She wrestled mightily with the fact that not every question can be answered, that very few choices are ever absolutely clear-cut and that sometimes people we are supposed to obey and respect are just as capable themselves of being wrong and of disappointing us.
Not very long after we read Huckleberry Finn our daughter became utterly enraptured by some books about a certain hero of the wizarding world, and our regular reading time came quickly to a halt. The Harry Potter series was one she came to own all her own and quite obsessively, though I did watch the movies with her. A somewhat hard and fast rule in our house is that you must read the book before you are allowed to watch the movie, so I did get to share in the anticipation of discovering the next part of the film version of the story after she completed each book. Part of the new state of things was that she was reading now for not only her own personal pleasure, but also because of her school's reading program. And, she had become what I had so wished she would: a reader and a voracious and passionate one at that. Once, noticing the library's display about Banned Books Week, she stood aghast and asked as if the mere thought of such a thing was utterly ridiculous, "Why would anyone ban a book, Dad?" Why indeed. I mourned the loss our reading time, but I also gave thanks each time I caught her curled up with a book in a chair or wrapped in a blanket with one on her bed or, best of all, overcome with sudden laughter, her head bent in that familiar reading pose we all know.
The only downside to this is something I have mentioned here before. To my ever-widening chagrin, she steadfastly avoids any book I recommend she read. How can this be? Especially after all the amazing books we have shared. And, yes, I have even tried the reverse psychology route. "Oh, you wouldn't like this one. It's far above your reading level and probably wouldn't interest you at all." She was on to my ploy immediately, much to the amusement of the library staff who overheard our conversation. But, recently there opened up a small crack in her armor, thrilling me. She and I went to the movies a week or so ago and saw for the first time the preview for a forthcoming version of The Hobbit. Given our daughter's propensity toward grand and sweeping epics of the fantastical sort, her eyes widened at the prospect of seeing it. And, it does look fantastic. I explained to her that The Hobbit is a book, a very famous book in fact, and the first in a very famous series about an entire other-world, much like the worlds of her beloved Harry Potter and of Narnia.
"You know what this means," I asked. Her face broke into a wide smile, "Yep. We have to read that book."
Over the years we graduated up in our reading. I cannot recall the first chapter book we read, but since then we have literally read hundreds of books together. It has been one of the joys of my life to open up the world of reading to her. I will never forget the look on her face when I first guided her to the juvenile fiction section of our local library. She saw immediately the possibility of it all and grinned up at me. I read books with her that I loved as a child, The Incredible Journey and Where the Red Fern Grows and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. But we also read books together that I had not, books that I came to love as much as she did. Books by Kate DiCamillo became a favorite for us both and we read nearly all of The Boxcar Children. I will forever remember the months we spent reading the entire Chronicles of Narnia, a series our daughter loved so much that when we finally turned the last page of the seventh and final book, I asked her what we should read next and her answer, without hesitation, was to start again at the very beginning.
More and more we told relatives who asked for gift suggestions about books she wanted and, at some point, she came to own The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She longed to read it. I held off for a while, hesitant to bring into her consciousness the serious and weighty issues brought forth by that book. But I had mixed feelings about it, because it is also a penultimate book about the magic and freedom of childhood and I wanted to share with her the fun in reading it. So, I decided to be honest with her, explaining my hesitancy to read this particular book because of a certain word used over and over again, a word full of hate and ignorance that was spoken as part of the ordinary language of the time and not one that we should ever repeat in conversation. She patiently stopped my earnest and sincere lecture to let me know that she was already very well aware of the word. I could rest assured that she understood its gravity and the reasons it was not to be used in our own daily language. So, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became one the more memorable books we have read together and I was proud of the good and critical questions it prompted from her. It opened up for us many conversations about morality and truth and the hard complexities of being human that I do not think we would have otherwise had. She wrestled mightily with the fact that not every question can be answered, that very few choices are ever absolutely clear-cut and that sometimes people we are supposed to obey and respect are just as capable themselves of being wrong and of disappointing us.
Not very long after we read Huckleberry Finn our daughter became utterly enraptured by some books about a certain hero of the wizarding world, and our regular reading time came quickly to a halt. The Harry Potter series was one she came to own all her own and quite obsessively, though I did watch the movies with her. A somewhat hard and fast rule in our house is that you must read the book before you are allowed to watch the movie, so I did get to share in the anticipation of discovering the next part of the film version of the story after she completed each book. Part of the new state of things was that she was reading now for not only her own personal pleasure, but also because of her school's reading program. And, she had become what I had so wished she would: a reader and a voracious and passionate one at that. Once, noticing the library's display about Banned Books Week, she stood aghast and asked as if the mere thought of such a thing was utterly ridiculous, "Why would anyone ban a book, Dad?" Why indeed. I mourned the loss our reading time, but I also gave thanks each time I caught her curled up with a book in a chair or wrapped in a blanket with one on her bed or, best of all, overcome with sudden laughter, her head bent in that familiar reading pose we all know.
The only downside to this is something I have mentioned here before. To my ever-widening chagrin, she steadfastly avoids any book I recommend she read. How can this be? Especially after all the amazing books we have shared. And, yes, I have even tried the reverse psychology route. "Oh, you wouldn't like this one. It's far above your reading level and probably wouldn't interest you at all." She was on to my ploy immediately, much to the amusement of the library staff who overheard our conversation. But, recently there opened up a small crack in her armor, thrilling me. She and I went to the movies a week or so ago and saw for the first time the preview for a forthcoming version of The Hobbit. Given our daughter's propensity toward grand and sweeping epics of the fantastical sort, her eyes widened at the prospect of seeing it. And, it does look fantastic. I explained to her that The Hobbit is a book, a very famous book in fact, and the first in a very famous series about an entire other-world, much like the worlds of her beloved Harry Potter and of Narnia.
"You know what this means," I asked. Her face broke into a wide smile, "Yep. We have to read that book."
11.10.2012
WALKING
Someday I would like to hike the Appalachian Trail. Perhaps that wish is a bit too much, considering the time and money and circumstances that all must align to make it come true. Living as I do very close to where the trail passes through our part of Virginia, I have had a number of friends and acquaintances who have hiked its complete length, and I probably have never expressed to them just how much I admire their feat. I have one friend out there walking as I type this, in fact, and his is a journey that I especially respect.
I imagine that my thoughts of hiking the trail are terribly romanticized and that, given the fact that I have never really hiked at all, I likely have an incomplete sense of the toil involved. Despite this, I think I have it in me. Of course, I also think I have a book or two in me, but I do not see them lying around anywhere nearby. Yet.
I am certain hiking the Appalachian Trail could very well be the hardest thing a person ever does. And, that is precisely what I am after. Somewhere along the way I became a person who seeks out physical and mental challenges. Actually, I suppose it happened when I became a runner. When I realized I could run, then that I could run a 5K, and then that I could run a half-marathon and then that I could run a marathon, a whole world of possibilities began opening up for me. There are now many times when I tell myself, "If you can run 26.2 miles, you can buckle down and do this." Whatever the this may be at the time.
People think that the hard part of running any distance, but especially longer ones, is the actual running itself. That is certainly one part of it, absolutely. After all, if it were not for the exertion involved, it would not be called exercise in the first place. And, of course, it takes much time to build up running muscles and the endurance to run for miles and miles. But the hardest part of distance running is far and away the mental challenge of it. Your brain, in the beginning especially, tries to tell you over and over again that you are doing something wrong. It asks you to stop. It begs you to stop. It tells you in a thousand different ways that you are foolish. And you believe it. But then comes the point when you realize that you do not have to listen to those thoughts. You can go further. You can stand it for another minute, another mile, and even another hour. That is when you realize that you have become a runner. You actually begin to crave the thrill of finding that point when it hurts and then pushing yourself beyond it.
Cheryl Strayed, in her book called Wild, which I finished last week, echoed these same thoughts in writing about what it took for her to keep putting one foot in front of the other each day on her hike from southernmost California to the Washington-Oregon border along the Pacific Crest Trail. Hers was a long walk of around 1,100 miles, putting a mere marathon to shame in some sense. In fact, there were days when she hiked nearly the equivalent in distance of a marathon. Then she got up the next day and walked some more. And then again the next day. On and on. Strayed had romanticized the notion of hiking for months in the wilderness, too, and found that the hardest part was the pure and simple daily grind of it. The fear, the weather, the animals, the blisters, the long list of dangers the trail holds all were no match, it seems, for the difficulty of merely keeping on, pushing herself further than she ever thought she could go. It is an astoundingly powerful thing to reach such a point, to grasp fully your own potential and to feel wash over you the pleasing ache and throbbing mix of exhaustion and accomplishment. The real sense of this was powerfully written by Strayed in her book and was bolstered by her skillful weaving into the narrative the difficult events of her life that led to her decision to begin in the first place. What she accomplished out there on the trail is compelling enough, but the story of what she found inside herself along the way made for a book that I could not help but plow through.
I think something else that draws me to want to hike the trail is the notion of simplicity. To be out and away, to be disconnected from an addiction to information and immediate communication, carrying everything you need on your back, with a singular and clear purpose: to just keep going. Perhaps it is the age I have reached or perhaps it is recent events in my own professional life--likely a combination of those things--but I find myself thinking more and more these days about what can be eliminated from the clutter of my life. It is so difficult in our culture to not be driven by the idea that more is better. More anything. More everything. Do not get me wrong, I myself am surrounded by stuff. I pine for gadgets and clothes and indulgent meals and so many things. But I am coming to see the emptiness in those cravings, the lack of real fulfillment once they are realized, and I am also coming to see how very little I can actually get by on. It is appealing to me to think of boiling it all down to the absolute barest of essentials.
Of course, I am told there are snakes. If I have one reservation about my ability to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, it is definitely the snakes. That might be harder for me than walking for miles and miles day after day with all I have on my back.
I imagine that my thoughts of hiking the trail are terribly romanticized and that, given the fact that I have never really hiked at all, I likely have an incomplete sense of the toil involved. Despite this, I think I have it in me. Of course, I also think I have a book or two in me, but I do not see them lying around anywhere nearby. Yet.
I am certain hiking the Appalachian Trail could very well be the hardest thing a person ever does. And, that is precisely what I am after. Somewhere along the way I became a person who seeks out physical and mental challenges. Actually, I suppose it happened when I became a runner. When I realized I could run, then that I could run a 5K, and then that I could run a half-marathon and then that I could run a marathon, a whole world of possibilities began opening up for me. There are now many times when I tell myself, "If you can run 26.2 miles, you can buckle down and do this." Whatever the this may be at the time.
People think that the hard part of running any distance, but especially longer ones, is the actual running itself. That is certainly one part of it, absolutely. After all, if it were not for the exertion involved, it would not be called exercise in the first place. And, of course, it takes much time to build up running muscles and the endurance to run for miles and miles. But the hardest part of distance running is far and away the mental challenge of it. Your brain, in the beginning especially, tries to tell you over and over again that you are doing something wrong. It asks you to stop. It begs you to stop. It tells you in a thousand different ways that you are foolish. And you believe it. But then comes the point when you realize that you do not have to listen to those thoughts. You can go further. You can stand it for another minute, another mile, and even another hour. That is when you realize that you have become a runner. You actually begin to crave the thrill of finding that point when it hurts and then pushing yourself beyond it.
Cheryl Strayed, in her book called Wild, which I finished last week, echoed these same thoughts in writing about what it took for her to keep putting one foot in front of the other each day on her hike from southernmost California to the Washington-Oregon border along the Pacific Crest Trail. Hers was a long walk of around 1,100 miles, putting a mere marathon to shame in some sense. In fact, there were days when she hiked nearly the equivalent in distance of a marathon. Then she got up the next day and walked some more. And then again the next day. On and on. Strayed had romanticized the notion of hiking for months in the wilderness, too, and found that the hardest part was the pure and simple daily grind of it. The fear, the weather, the animals, the blisters, the long list of dangers the trail holds all were no match, it seems, for the difficulty of merely keeping on, pushing herself further than she ever thought she could go. It is an astoundingly powerful thing to reach such a point, to grasp fully your own potential and to feel wash over you the pleasing ache and throbbing mix of exhaustion and accomplishment. The real sense of this was powerfully written by Strayed in her book and was bolstered by her skillful weaving into the narrative the difficult events of her life that led to her decision to begin in the first place. What she accomplished out there on the trail is compelling enough, but the story of what she found inside herself along the way made for a book that I could not help but plow through.
I think something else that draws me to want to hike the trail is the notion of simplicity. To be out and away, to be disconnected from an addiction to information and immediate communication, carrying everything you need on your back, with a singular and clear purpose: to just keep going. Perhaps it is the age I have reached or perhaps it is recent events in my own professional life--likely a combination of those things--but I find myself thinking more and more these days about what can be eliminated from the clutter of my life. It is so difficult in our culture to not be driven by the idea that more is better. More anything. More everything. Do not get me wrong, I myself am surrounded by stuff. I pine for gadgets and clothes and indulgent meals and so many things. But I am coming to see the emptiness in those cravings, the lack of real fulfillment once they are realized, and I am also coming to see how very little I can actually get by on. It is appealing to me to think of boiling it all down to the absolute barest of essentials.
Of course, I am told there are snakes. If I have one reservation about my ability to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, it is definitely the snakes. That might be harder for me than walking for miles and miles day after day with all I have on my back.
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