The Achievement of Wendell Berry by Fritz Oehlschlaeger

Author:Fritz Oehlschlaeger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2011-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Imagining the Practice of Peace in a Century of War

A Place on Earth, Hannah Coulter, and Jayber Crow

A Place on Earth. Wendell Berry’s novel offers rich possibilities for meditation on its title. The novel is about a particular place, Port William, Kentucky, during a time, World War II, in which the life of that place has come under the influence—perhaps the tyranny—of places far distant on earth, unknown to those in Port William except through the thin details of radio broadcasts. As those in Port William live through the war, they experience the increasing necessity of connection to their place on earth and its human membership. Some lose their place on earth. Tom Coulter is killed in Italy while bulldozing dead soldiers into a mass grave; Virgil Feltner is reported “missing in action,” his body never discovered. Maintaining a place on earth for them becomes a matter of grief, memory, and hope on the part of those left. Even those not killed in war can sometimes lose their places on earth almost as profoundly as Tom or Virgil. Gideon Crop is missing in action for months after the drowning of his daughter, Annie. Ernest Finley, maimed in World War I, establishes what seems a viable place for himself until the hopelessness of his attraction to Ida Crop makes him aware of just how lost and homeless he is.

Each of us begins at home, as the child of specific parents, the carrier of a lineage. As embodied beings we carry about the visible marks of relationship to other embodied beings. We are more than just reminders of one another; we are more or less related incarnations of one another. Our first place on earth is our mother’s body. The womb is the first of a series of homes through which we pass on the way to our inevitable resting place on earth, the grave. Whether that grave, however, is truly a place on earth—marked out and known, cared for—is a matter of others’ fidelity, individual and communal. Like Uncle Stanley, the aging gravedigger who turns over his trade to Jayber Crow, the older we get, the more difficult we find it to get out of the grave. Berry is himself more than a little “incorrigible” in the same way he attributes to Jayber during the graveyard scene. “No matter how near home he sets his mind to work,” Berry says of Jayber, “it always beelines for the final questions.”1 Perhaps that’s because those final questions are the ones nearest home, those that face up to the way we live day by day in our particular places on earth in the light of the sure knowledge of our final earthly home. Or as Jayber, Burley, and Big Ellis sing: “Yes, that old dark and silent / Ground is finally going to get us” (296).

Some, like Brother Preston, the preacher who comes to console the Feltners, deny too easily the seeming finality of the grave. His “hastening to rest in the hope of Heaven” (98) runs the risk of devaluing our life here in this place on earth.

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.