How It Went by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Having outlived so many and so much that will not be known again in this world, Andy has come to feel in body and mind sudden afflictions of sorrow for the loss of people, places, and times. He has passed the watershed in his life when he began losing old friends faster than he made new ones. Now he is far better acquainted in the graveyard on the hill at Port William than in the living town—than in the living country, in fact, and the rest of the world. And so he is diminished and so he lives on, his mind more and more enriched by the company of immortals who inhabit it. He is often given to the thought of subtraction, of what has been given, what taken, what remains. He is no longer surprised, when he is alone, to hear himself speak aloud a prayer of gratitude or blessing.

And yet by their absence his old companions have in a way come closer to him than they were when they were alive. They seem to involve themselves intimately in his life as he goes on living it. His thoughts now often seem to come to him in their words and voices.

On a certain kind of warm summer evening with a steady breeze from the west, Elton Penn will say to him again, as Elton said to him when he was a boy, “Do you feel how soft the air is? It’s going to rain.”

Or sometimes, when he is looking with satisfaction at his steep pastures now healed and “haired over” with grass, he will hear his father say, “This land responds to good treatment.”

Or when in the apparently unbreakable habit of the years of his strength Andy catches himself working too fast, Mart Rowanberry will say, as he said to him once with a certain condescension in the overeagerness of his youth: “You aiming to keep that up all day?”

Or he will remember sometimes in the evening, when the weariness of the day and of his years has come upon him, his grandpa Catlett speaking in one sentence the tragedy and triumph of his knowledge: “Ay God, I know what a man can do in a day.”

Or he will hear again his granddaddy Feltner on occasions more than enough: “What can’t be helped must be endured.”

Or when, as sometimes happens, he is listening to somebody who has started talking and can’t stop, he recalls the judgment of Art Rowanberry: “I reckon he must be a right smart fellow, but whatever he knows he learnt it from hisself.”

As he thinks back over his kinships and friendships, of those he has loved and who have loved him, and of the once worn out and broken farm that he has cared for, that has responded to his care with health and beauty, he is able to think well enough of himself. But he still has his wits too, and his memory, and he is often enough reminded of his acts of thoughtlessness

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.