And for joy in the afternoon, here are some quotes from Wendell Berry. These quotes are from A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership, from three of those stories: “Drouth,” “Stand by Me,” and “Not a Tear.” Enjoy …
It is perhaps impossible for a person living unhappily with a flush toilet to imagine a person living happily without one.
A drouth is an event of the atmosphere of the earth. It is also an event of the atmosphere of the human mind, which suffers a disturbance that affects everything. It affects the meanings of memory and history. It affects one’s sense of the future. Everybody on the place old enough to remember the 1930s regarded our present drouth with a fearful respect that could be described as primeval: It had been felt by country people since the beginning of time.
Grandpa, I think, did not give much thought to the end of the world. It was the continuance of the world that worried him. Of the theologies then available on the place, Grandpa’s was probably the simplest: Old Marster is in charge, and we are not; Old Marster knows, and we don’t. But Grandma had pondered a good deal about the end of the world. It was fearful to her, and in times of unusual weather she dwelt upon it.
In the minds of us humans, weather draws superstition as molasses draws flies. It draws also a sort of supernatural mystification that is a cut or two above superstition.
Aunt Sarah Jane was full of the spaciousness, and the enchantment too, of mystery, and in the network of attractions that ruled me in those days I would be drawn down to listen to her in the two-room house where she and Dick lived at the corner of the woods. Like Grandma, Aunt Sarah Jane was thoughtful of the end of the world. But whereas Grandma regarded it with some deep disturbance of temporality and dread, Aunt Sarah Jane, who held it sufficiently in fear, also looked upon it with some approval as the time when justice would rain down at last. I think she anticipated with a certain pleasure the look on some people’s faces when suddenly they would hear behind them the “great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying,I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.”
So to Aunt Sarah Jane, the weather and all things of the realm of the sky were heavy with portent. From the sky, news of eternity irrupted into the daily world. To her, the events of the sky—rain, no-rain, clouds, rainbows, winds, the phases and attitudes of the moon —all were signs. The significance of the signs might not be discernable then or ever, but they were never merely what they appeared to be. They were signs. Aunt Sarah Jane had a whole curriculum of fascinating subjects. She was precisely a spellbinder. I listened to her, as Grandpa would sometimes say, with all the ears I had. And yet her spells had their limits. Her unrelenting sense of the convergences of worlds, of the hereafter with the here, finally would so unsteady me that I would have to leave and walk the solid footpath back up to the barn.
(Aunt Sarah Jane’s husband is Dick Watson):
Small amusements lasted him a long time. He had a cheerful heart and a sympathetic one. I think he suffered the drouth as the plants and animals suffered it. He believed that it finally would rain, for finally it always had, but he did not know when.
(The Big Day was a once-a-year celebration for all of the black community):
For a while I took part in these conversations about The Big Day as if I would be going to it myself, hand-in-hand with Dick, for as we tramped about together we often would be holding hands. And then as we approached the great event, we would arrive finally, inevitably, at the racial division. Dick would be going without me. He would be part of it, party to the joy of it, and I would not. I still feel the disappointment and sorrow of that parting of ways, and I feel the strangeness of it.
Thanks to Grandma Catlett and Aunt Sarah Jane, the end of the world was not strange to me. I did not greatly like the thought, but I knew then, as I know now, that some day will be the last. But categorical divisions among people still seem to me to be strange. I understand them, I believe, and I have felt their attraction. But it matters to me that as a small boy in Kentucky sixty-odd years ago I could have had a vision in which for a while the racial difference simply disappeared.
What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap, that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you think of that you ought to’ve asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don’t. And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you, and in a way you go with them.
They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You can’t see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It’s with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.
It was maybe the animals most of all that kept us going, the good animals we depended on, that depended on us: our work mules, the cattle, the sheep, the hogs, even the chickens. They were a help to us because they didn’t know our grief but just quietly lived on, suffering what they suffered, enjoying what they enjoyed, day by day. We took care of them, we did what had to be done, we went on.
Not a Tear (1945) – here is the whole story … (Andy, the narrator, is a young man growing up with his family in Kentucky near the Ohio River. His father is the town lawyer. – Berry knew his bible and he knew his Harper Lee, or did Harper know her Wendell Berry? …)
 Dick Watson was my grandfather Catlett’s farm hand, and he was my friend. When he died, I did not go to his funeral. I was in school. It occurred to nobody that I should have gone, but I should have. I wish I had.
My father and Grandpa Catlett did go to the funeral and so I know about it. Maybe other white people were there too, about that I don’t know. But it is important to know that at least two were there. This would have been the fall of 1945, and so everybody there belonged to the old division of the races we came to call “segregation.” They had been born in it, had lived in it, partly at least had been made as they were by it. And yet that formal and legal division, applied after all to people who were neighbors, made within itself exceptions to itself. And so they came together, the white with the black, in duty to Dick Watson, at one in loss and in sorrow.
“Well, sir, it was perfect, Andy. It was just right,” my father said to comfort me, for he knew I was grieving. “That preacher was splendid.”
From time to time he recited parts of the sermon to me as he remembered it, for he could not forget, and I have not forgot. I will try to line it out as the preacher sounded it. “It was not a speech,” my father said. “It was a song.”
Standing above the open coffin in which Dick’s body lay in his Sunday clothes in its stillness and Aunt Sarah Jane who sat in the black dress of her sorrow nearby, the preacher gestured broadly with his opened hands, all the while looking at the people, as if to see if they knew already what he was going to say. He said:
This ain’t him.
He ain’t here.
This ain’t no more our brother,
our beloved. For he
ain’t here. Where he is
all is well.
All is well with Dick Watson.
All is well.
He has come to a door
to a mansion
didn’t have to knock
to get in. He had heard
that voice.
He has heard, O Lord,
thy voice.
“Brother Watson, come in.
Well done.
Well done, thou good
and faithful servant.
Well done. Enter
into the joy of thy Lord.”
He ain’t here.
This ain’t no more our brother,
our beloved. For he
ain’t here. Where he is
all is well.
All is well with Dick Watson.
All is well.
He has come to a door
to a mansion
didn’t have to knock
to get in. He had heard
that voice.
He has heard, O Lord,
thy voice.
“Brother Watson, come in.
Well done.
Well done, thou good
and faithful servant.
Well done. Enter
into the joy of thy Lord.”
“Something like that,” my father said. “For one man can’t do it by himself. He has got to have help. He has got to have inspiration, and help too from the other people.”
The sermon took a while. The people took up the preacher’s phrases and sang them back to him. They called out to him to encourage him:
“Amen!”
“Yes!”
“Amen!”
They shouted to him to go ahead, to preach it, for he had it right.
At first some of the people were crying, and Grandpa cried with them. And then, as the voice of the preacher called them, a sense of triumph grew among them, and the tone shifted. Heaven and earth drew together. The preacher said:
Blessèd!
Blessèd are the poor
in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessèd!
Blessèd are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
Children,
don’t cry no more.
Sister Sarah Jane,
don’t cry no more.
Our brother,
where he is,
he don’t hear no crying.
For his burden is lifted.
For freedom
has come to him
and rest.
For where he is
ain’t no crying there.
Not a sigh.
Not a tear.
in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessèd!
Blessèd are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
Children,
don’t cry no more.
Sister Sarah Jane,
don’t cry no more.
Our brother,
where he is,
he don’t hear no crying.
For his burden is lifted.
For freedom
has come to him
and rest.
For where he is
ain’t no crying there.
Not a sigh.
Not a tear.
The preacher stood then with his hands again opened. A beautiful voice sang back from among the people: “Nooo, not a tear.” The other agreeing voices quieted and fell away. While the preacher regarded the people with his hands still lifted, my father said, an immense quiet came upon them, and the freedom of Dick Watson in that moment was present to them all.
They sang a hymn, they said a prayer, and then they let him go.
