Remembering

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.

It was as though grace and peace were bestowed on them out of the sanctity of marriage itself, which simply furnished them to one another, free and sufficient as rain to leaf. It was as if they were not making marriage but being made by it, and, while it held them, time and their lives flowed over them, like swift water over stones, rubbing them together, grinding off their edges, making them fit together, fit to be together, in the only way that fragments can be rejoined. And though Andy did not understand this, and though he suffered from it, he trusted it and rejoiced in it.

he sees, one cannot know enough to trust. To trust is simply to give oneself; the giving is for the future, for which there is no evidence.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

That he is who he is and no one else is the result of a long choosing, chosen and chosen again. He thinks of the long dance of men and women behind him, most of whom he never knew, some he knew, two he yet knows, who, choosing one another, chose him. He thinks of the choices, too, by which he chose himself as he now is. How many choices, how much chance, how much error, how much hope have made that place and people that, in turn, made him? He does not know. He knows that some who might have left chose to stay, and that some who did leave chose to return, and he is one of them. Those choices have formed in time and place the pattern of a membership that chose him, yet left him free until he should choose it, which he did once, and now has done again.

Then their quarrels, as he knew or would know sooner or later in the course of them, were about duality: They were two longing to be one, or one dividing relentlessly into two.

They were not going to live again in a time like that.

She looks down at him and smiles, then suddenly pulls his head against her. Oh my boy, how far away will you be some time remembering this.

And then Andy told him about Meikelberger's farm. Had Isaac ever thought of buying more land – say, a neighbor's farm? "Well, if I did I've have to go in debt to buy it, and to farm it. It would be more time and help than I've got. And I'd lose my neighbor." "You'd rather have your neighbor?" "We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves. We try. If you need them, it helps.

He is long past sleep now. His mind has begun to work on the agenda that it sets for itself, and he knows that he will not be able to stop it.

We stood and looked and knowed it was all the time we had and from now on we must remember. We must look now forever.

a woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap. . . . The businesswoman is austerely tailored and coiffured; her eye-glasses are severe. . . . her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

His life has never rested on anything he has known beforehand — none of it. He chose it before he knew it, and again afterwards.

In the coal counties, east and west, they were strip-mining without respect for the past or mercy to the future, and the reign of a compunctionless national economy was established everywhere.

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

And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light.