Remembering

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FICTION

Andy Catlett
Hannah Coulter
Fidelity
Jayber Crow
The Memory of Old Jack
Nathan Coulter
A Place on Earth
That Distant Land
Watch With Me
The Wild Birds
A World Lost

 

POETRY

The Broken Ground
Clearing
Collected Poems: 1957-1982
The Country of Marriage
Entries
Farming: A Hand Book
Findings
Openings
A Part
Sabbaths
Sayings and Doings
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1998)
A Timbered Choir
The Wheel

 

ESSAYS

The Way of Ignorance
Another Turn of the Crank
The Art of the Commonplace
Citizenship Papers
A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Hidden Wound
Home Economics
Life Is a Miracle
Long-Legged House
Recollected Essays: 1965-1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
Standing by Words
The Unforeseen Wilderness
The Unsettling of America
What Are People For?

. . . to him that is joined to all the living there is hope . . .

Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you. Only then will you have true courage.

It is dark. He does not know where he is. And then he sees pale light from the street soaking in above the drawn drapes. It is not a light to see by, but only makes the darkness visible. He has slept, to his surprise, but has wakened in the same unease that kept him sleepless long after he went to bed and that remained with him in dream.

In his dream a great causeway had been built across the creek valley where he lives, the heavy roadbed and its supports a materialized obliviousness to his house and barn that stood belittled nearby, as if great Distance itself had come to occupy that place. Bulldozers pushed and trampled the loosened, disformed, denuded earth, working it like dough toward some new shape entirely human-conceived. The place was already unrecognizable except for the small house and barn destined to be enrubbled with all the rest that had been there. Watching, Andy knew that all the last remnants of old forest, the chief beauty and dignity of that place, were now fallen and gone. The flowers that had bloomed in the shade of the standing groves in the spring were gone. The birds were gone. The fields and their names, the farmsteads and the neighbors were gone; the graveyards and the names of the dead, all gone.

So near to the causeway as to be almost under it stood a concrete building of long, windowless, humming corridors, in which workers were passing. In the depths of the building, in a blank-walled, whitely lighted room, a fat man sat behind a desk, eating the living flesh of his
own forearm, all the while making a speech in a tone of pleading reasonableness:

“I
have
to do this. I am
starving.
Three meals a day are
not
enough. To get more, it would be necessary to contract unsavory foreign alliances. I cannot
afford
to quit. I realize that this is not ideal. But I am not an idealist. I am not a naive dreamer. I am constrained by my circumstances to be a hard-headed realist. Neighbors? I have no neighbors. Friends? I have no friends. This is my independence. This is my victory.”

The causeway, the labyrinthine building, the house and barn, all the diminished, naked valley were dim in midday dusk, the dingy light too weak to cast a shadow.

An old terror, learned long ago from his time, returned to Andy now and shook him — not the terror of the end of the world, but of the end, simply, of all he knew and loved, which would then exist only in his knowing, the little creature of his memory, and so he would be forced to collaborate willy-nilly in the dominance of human intention over the world.

But he knew that he was already implicated, already one of the guilty, for as he looked upon that destroyed place, which once had been his home, he realized that even as he mourned it he could not remember it as it was; he could find in his spirit no vision of anything it ever was that it ever might be again. For he himself had been diminished. He himself was disformed and naked, a mere physical quantity, its existence verifiable by an ache. That is what woke him.

As he lies in bed in the dark room, only his mind is awake, his body feelingless and still. Leaving the dream, as a place to which it may return again, his mind resumes a thoughtless, exhausted wakefulness, dumbly pained. The unhanded, healed stump of his right wrist lies in the dark beside him. For the time, he is refusing to think about it, though that refusal costs him all thought.

But thought comes. His body twitches and stirs on its own, alerts itself to the strangeness of bed and room, and absence lives again at the end of his arm.

The feel of the bed, the smell of the room seem compounded of the
strangeness of all the strangers who have slept there: salesmen, company officers, solitary travelers, who have entered, shut the door, set down their bags, and stood, weary and silent, afraid to speak, even to themselves, their own names. A man could go so far from home, he thinks, that his own name would become unspeakable by him, unanswerable by anyone, so that if he dared to speak it, it would escape him utterly, a bird out an open window, leaving him untongued in some boundless amplitude of mere absence.

It is as though his name is now a secret, a small vital organ pulsing its life away. For now he has come to a place where no one knows his name but himself, where nobody but himself knows where he is. He is still going away on the far side of the boundary he crossed when he came up the ramp at the airport and saw the young woman whose name and description he carried in a letter in his pocket. She stood amid the crowd, looking for him this way and that around the heads and shoulders of the unloading passengers who hurried past, dividing around her. She saw him and smiled, anxiety leaving her face. She was from the college where, in two hours, he was to speak.

“Pardon me. Are you Andrew Catlett?”

He looked at her as if surprised to be so accosted, and stepped past.

“No mam.”

He had come to San Francisco from an agriculture conference held that day at a great university of the Midwest. The meeting had taken place in a low building of cast concrete, of which the second story was much wider than the first, as if an architect unable to draw a curve had attempted to design a large mushroom. The walls inside were also of concrete, left unfinished. In contrast to the rude walls, all the appointments of the interior were luxurious: the stair rails of polished mahogany, the draperies richly woven, the carpets so bright and soft that the conferees moving over them made no sound, as if treading on clouds. The second-floor lobby, surrounded by meeting rooms, was furnished with deep-cushioned chairs and sofas; a table with a white cloth bore a coffee urn and an assortment of pastries. The effect of these rich furnishings, the silence of the carpet, and the correspondingly hushed voices of the
conferees standing in groups was that of bated anticipation; the room seemed not to have accepted those who were in it, but to remain expectant of someone more important who perhaps was not going to attend.

As the time of the meeting drew near, the conferees moved to the white-clothed table, set down their empty cups, and singly and in groups straggled into the meeting room. Andy, who did not know anyone, took a seat high up in the back. The room was a large theater, with many rows of seats steeply pitched toward a dais at the front. On the dais was a lectern with a microphone in front of a huge blank screen. The room was windowless, lighted with bright, cold light. The fan of a distant air conditioner whispered through the walls.