Not too long ago, I posted a review of Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. Since then, I’ve been slowly reading Berry’s entire Port William series. Each book has been a delight, the meeting of a new friend, the unfolding of a world both complex and simple.
Rather than write a review of A Place on Earth, the second book in the series – since it would be so similar to the Hannah Coulter review – here’s an excerpt from the book. The conversation is between Mat and Margaret, a long-married couple. Their only son and World War 2 soldier, Virgil, has been missing in action for several months. The war is now over, and the are coming to understand their son is not MIA, but dead.
“Mat, when we’ve lost it all, we’ve had what we’ve lost.”
“But to lose it. Isn’t there anything in you that rebels against that?”
She looks steadily at him, considering that – whether unsure of her answer or unwilling to answer too readily, he cannot tell. He is aware that Margaret is trying him, drawing deliberately at the bindings between them, as he has tried with her with his singleness.
“No,” she says.
“None at all?”
“Virgil,” she says as if to remind or acknowledge what they are talking about. “From the day he was born I knew he would die. That was how I loved him, partly. I’d brought him into the world that would give him things to love, and take them away. You too, Mat. You knew it. I knew so well that he would die that, when he did disappear from us the way he did, I was familiar with the pain. I’d had it in me all my life.”
A tone of weeping has come into her voice, though not openly, and Mat does not yet move toward her. The weeping seems on the circumstance of what she is saying, not the result – an old weeping, well known, bearable by an endurance both inborn and long practiced. The dusk is thickening so their eyes no longer clearly meet, though they still look toward each other.
“But I don’t believe that when his death is subtracted from his life it leaves nothing. Do you, Mat?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t.”
“What it leaves is his life. How could I turn away from it now any more than I could when he was a little child, and not love it and be glad of it, just because death is in it?”
Her words fall on him like water and like light…
…”And, Mat,” she says, “we belong to each other. After all these years. Doesn’t that mean something?”
It is a long time before he answers…”I don’t know what it means,” he says finally. “I know what it’s worth.”
Something shifted in me after reading that passage. And this is a book filled with such passages, interspersed with humor and homeyness to comfort the soul.
If you could use some humor and homeyness, check out Wendell Berry’s Port William series. Let them comfort your soul, too.
