But thinking of Mattie’s marriage, I saw too how a marriage, in bringing two people into each other’s presence, must include loneliness and error. I imagined a moment when the husband and wife realize that their marriage includes their faults, that they do not perfect each other, and that in making their marriage they also fail it and must carry to the grave things they cannot give away.
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.
The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.
He was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn’t think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself.
As much as any of the old-timers, he regarded the Depression as not over and done with but merely absent for a while, like Halley’s comet.
I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.
To know that I was known by a new living being, who had not existed until she was made in my body by my desire and brought forth into the world by my pain and strength – that changed me. My heart, which seemed to have had only loss and grief in it before, now had joy in it also.
We have bought unconditionally the economists’ line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth.
Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.
Oversimplified moral certainties – always requiring hostility, always potentially violent – isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous.
After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said?
The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven. The great aim of modern life has been to improve the future – or even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be “better.
There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.
Never forget: we are alive within mysteries.” – Wendell Berry.
Be thankful and repay Growth with good work and care. Work done in gratitude Kindly, and well, is prayer.
I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.
As I did not know then but know now, the surface of the river is like a living soul, which is easy to disturb, is often disturbed, but, growing calm, shows what it was, is, and will be.