That Distant Land

In the process of helping clean out the books from my parents' house a while back, my dad, who is pictured above when he was much younger and living in northeast Missouri, gave me some books of fiction I gave to him for father's days and birthdays.

It all started, I think, when I gave him That Distant Land: The Collected Stories by Wendell Berry since I thought he'd like them. Berry focuses on his fictional setting of Port William and its inhabitants throughout the years. I don't know if the stories originally had dates attached to them, but That Distant Land provides the date of when the story happens. The book starts with "The Hurt Man (1888)" and ends with "The Inheritors (1986)."

There obviously was a heck of a lot of change from the late 19th century to the 80s, and the stories reflect that some though Berry is more interested in telling a strong narrative that focuses on everyday people, farmers mostly, in a small town in Kentucky.

Many of the stories are odes to the old fashioned way of farming even before people started using tractors like the one pictured above. Port William is a community of farmers--not a rural factory.

I've read more of Wendell Berry's non-fiction than any of his stuff. He's one of my favorite writers because of his social commentary that critiques our "progress." And it was impossible not to see sociopolitical implications of how he depicts the characters and their predicaments.

In a commonplace book-like move here, I thought I'd just present some passages from  stories that I underlined or scribed marginalia beside because I like the ideas or I simply enjoyed the craft of his prose. You can read them and do what you want to do with them in your minds:

• "I had learned what I knew, the bare outline of the event, without asking questions, both fearing the pain that I knew surrounded the story and honoring the silence that surrounded the pain." From "Pray Without Ceasing (1912)"
• "And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else." From "Pray Without Ceasing (1912)"
• "'Elected's ass! Auctioned! A governor gets elected by auctioning hisself off. Governors don't govern Kentucky--companies govern Kentucky. We'll see the day when some damn company will tear the capitol down and sell it off for doorstops.'" From "The Discovery of Kentucky (sometime in the 50s)"
• "'But when you quit living in the price and starting living in the place, you're in a different line of succession.'" From "It Wasn't Me (1953)"
• "'Everything about a place that's different from its price is a gift.'" From "It Wasn't Me (1953)"
• "If a man eighty-two years old has not seen enough, then nobody will ever see enough. Such a little piece of the world as he has before him now would be worth a man's long life, watching and listening. And then he could go two hundred feet and live again another life, listening and watching, and his eyes would never be satisfied with seeing, or his ears filled with hearing." From "The Boundary (1965)"
• "For a long time, in Port William, what had gone had not been replaced. Its own attention had turned away from itself toward what it could not be." From "That Distant Land (1965)"
• "The important thing, Art said, was for a man to feel good and be satisfied with what he had." From "A Friend of Mine (1967)"
• "Elton turned the melon and drew the cut the rest of the way around. The knife had not penetrated all the way through, and he had to strike the melon lightly against the ground to open it. And then he took one of the halves and sliced it twice. The flesh was dark red, juicy, and sweet. He ate it in huge bites, not bothering to spit out the seeds. He sat, eagerly eating the melon, looking out and down where the Sand Ripple valley opened into the wider valley of the river. The second half of the melon he ate more slowly, working the seeds free of the pulp and spitting them out. He had a gift for such moments and he was having a good time. When he had eaten the melon he took a drink from his jug, and then he lit a cigarette and got up." From "A Friend of Mine (1967)"
• "They needed the feeling that they would have when at last they would be done, the feeling of having done it and of being done. They needed their being together and all the talk that passed between them. They needed even what they dreaded, the difficulty of their work and their hard pride in being equal to it." From "A Friend of Mine (1967)"
• "What he was struggling to make clear is the process by which unbridled economic forces draw life, wealth, and intelligence off the farms and out of the country towns and set them into conflict with their sources. Farm produce leaves the farm to nourish an economy that has thrived by the ruin of the land. In this way, in the terms of Wheeler's speech, price wars against value." From "The Wild Birds (1967)"
• "From them he learned the ways that people lived by the soil and their care of it, by the bounty of crops and animals, and by the power of horses and mules." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "The emergency rooms and corridors were filled with the bloodied and the bewildered, for it was now the tail end of another Friday night of the Great American Spare-Time Civil War." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "Timber cutters, in recent years, had had their eye on these trees and had approached Burley about 'harvesting' them. 'I reckon you had better talk to Danny here.' Burley said. And Danny smiled that completely friendly, totally impenetrable smile of his, and merely shook his head." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "The Port William neighborhood had as many people, probably, as it had ever had, but it did not have them where it needed them. It had a good many of them now on little city lots carved out of farms, from which they commuted to city jobs." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "Danny Branch was one of Wheeler Catlett's last comforts, for Danny embodied much of the old integrity of country life that Wheeler had loved and stood for. In a time when farmers had been told and had believed that they could not prosper if they did not 'expand,' as if the world were endless, Danny and Lyda had never dreamed beyond the boundaries of their own place; so far as Wheeler knew, they had never coveted anything that was their neighbor's." From "The Inheritors (1986)"
• "Off beyond the highway they could see a farm that was becoming a housing development. The old farmhouse and a barn were still standing in the midst of several large new expensive houses without trees." From "The Inheritors (1986)"