" Wow. This book is a gift. I first heard about Wendell Berry in college when we were studying nature writers and I think we read some of his poetry. But I haven't really thought of him since then, yet I am so glad I picked this up. I loved this novel. It's about a small farming community and covers the life of one woman in that community. The way people are in this book and their values feel so familiar to me, and I don't find many books like that. And although there is much about this that feels old fashioned and familiar, there's something revolutionary about it too. Made me feel the way I felt the first time I read Thoreau, reminding me to question my assumptions and to really ask myself who I am, what it is that I want for my life, and not to be afraid to march to the beat of a different drummer. I just don't find books like this everyday, something with so much wisdom. A lot of reviews I read call Wendell Berry a prophet and I can see why, having read this, he's almost in a class of his own. And, after reading a lot of post modern stuff, which sometimes seems empty, he makes me feel like there is still hope. Now more than ever I need to read books that give me hope. I have to put in some quotes from the book about married love that made me weep (literally) for their profound beauty and truth.
"Watching him and watching myself in my memory now, I know again what I knew before, but now I know more than that. Now I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world's wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place. This love would be one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world."
"We were looking at each other, though we could barely see. It was almost dark. But to know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light. When a woman and a man give themselves to each other, they have a light between them that nobody but them can see. It doesn't shine outward into time. They see only each other and what is between them."
"What I was always reaching toward in him was his gentleness that had been made in him by loss and grief and suffering, a gentleness opposite to the war that he wasn't going to talk about, and never did, but that I know at least something about, having learned it since he died.
The gentleness I knew in him seemed to be calling out, and it was a gentleness in me that answered. That gentleness, calling and answering, giving and taking, brought us together. It brought us into the room of love. It made our place clear around us."
"The rhymes came. But you may have a long journey to travel to meet somebody in the innermost inwardness and sweetness of that room. You can't get there just by wanting to, or just because the night falls. The meeting is prepared in the long day, in the work of years, in the keeping of faith, in kindness.
The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day's end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together. What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?"
ON MEDITATION:
"I sit and let the quiet come to me. It doesn't come right away. I have to quiet myself before I can hear the quiet of the place, and a car passing along the road up on the hillside or an airplane flying over makes it harder. But I listen and wait, and at last it comes. It is an old quiet, only deepened by the sound of the creek, a bird singing, or a barking squirrel. It goes back to the beginning..." "
— Callie, 1/25/2014