As I have told [over the story of our life], the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of mine seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love, where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's. Or it is Heaven and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, . . . , do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn't.
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
Hannah Coulter is a beautiful book, and is complete in itself, but if I were going to start reading Berry's books, I would not start there. I would start where I did start with a A Place on Earth, which is very good and very sad, and Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, which is filled with humour, some subtle, and some decidedly not. A Place on Earth is Berry's second novel, the first is Nathan Coulter, the story of Hannah's husband in his youth. Written seven years earlier than A Place on Earth, Nathan Coulter is a young man's novel (Berry was 26 when it was published), filled with a young man's angst and anger. It's different in tone from all his other fiction, so even though it's the first, I wouldn't start there.
The only quibble I have with Berry is that one gets the impression that small farming communities such as Port William, are the only place where we kind find a membership--where we can enter that room of love. Perhaps it is the best place for that sort of community to flourish, but we can't all live there. In fact, very few of us can. However, we are, most of us, searching for that membership all the time and we find it in some familiar places and some that are very odd and implausible, like the internet. Grace is everywhere, and it's Grace that holds us together.
The real room of love is here and the membership is everywhere.
The only quibble I have with Berry is that one gets the impression that small farming communities such as Port William, are the only place where we kind find a membership--where we can enter that room of love. Perhaps it is the best place for that sort of community to flourish, but we can't all live there. In fact, very few of us can. However, we are, most of us, searching for that membership all the time and we find it in some familiar places and some that are very odd and implausible, like the internet. Grace is everywhere, and it's Grace that holds us together.
The real room of love is here and the membership is everywhere.
AMDG
Beautiful last line. And of course true.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know Nathan had his own novel. I'll have to read it, though taking notice of your reservation. As I'm sure we've discussed before, The Memory of Old Jack is the only other Berry novel I've read.
I've never read Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding but am wondering if her use of "member" is at all like Berry's.
Well, she's talking about a much smaller membership. It's very poignant. You should read it.
ReplyDeleteBut, it's the same kind of seeking I'm talking about in the post.
AMDG
I have to admit that when I see McCullers's name now I immediately think of Flannery O'Connor's putdown of her in one of her letters.
ReplyDeleteWell, she didn't much like To Kill a Mockingbird either and I love that.
ReplyDeleteAMDG