Wendell Berry Commonplace
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Hello Friends,
Since it is Wendell Berry month we decided to keep our monthly Commonplace post in theme. I hope you are enjoying living in the world of Port William and contemplating how to live life in a more human way. Maybe you can glean some more inspiration from his other works as well. So without further ado, here are some of our favorite Berry quotes…
Hannah
When nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun.
(From “What Matters” in Home Economics)
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. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force that has not power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to - because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.
Jess
“This story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed” (Hannah Coulter, 5).
“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told” (Jayber Crow, 29).
“Aunt Cordie was good company and always kind, but she saw to it that I did my work right. The best part of my education, and surely the most useful part, came from her” (Jayber Crow, 23)
Reminds me of…
“Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women” (Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton, 148).
Kelsie
It is clear to me from my experience as a teacher, for example, that children need ordinary daily association with both parents. They need to see their parents at work; they need, at first, to play at the work they see their parents doing, and then they need to work with their parents. It does not matter so much that this working together should be what is called “quality time,” but it matters a great deal that the work done should have the dignity economic value.
Feminism, the Body, and the Machine (The Art of the Commonplace, 69)
A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word.
You have this life and no other. You have had this life with this man and no other. What would it have been to have had a different life with a different man? You will never know. That makes the world forever a mystery, and you will just have to be content for it to be that way.
(Hannah Coulter, 109)
Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.
In Case You Missed It:
What We’re Reading Now:
November
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
December
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
January
Othello by William Shakespeare
A Few Reminders:
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My mom got a book by Wendell Berry for my dad for Christmas, and when he opened it we discovered that it was signed!
Kelsie, I love your Wendell Berry collection! Jess, your quote from Chesterton about the "tyranny of women" within the sphere of education is fascinating to think about. Makes me think that the education of women should be a prominent priority for any society!