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Stephen Cochran's avatar

Wendell Berry wrote the following in a short story called “The Rainbow,” and I want to quote the whole paragraph because it’s relevant to the initial feelings you expressed regarding the passage of time. Nevertheless I want to emphasize that the writing is his, not mine:

“We arrive here in the world having forgotten where we came from, though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a distant shine like that of a house window at night on the far side of the valley, perhaps what some have called ‘the inner light,’ to guide us when finally we have been jolted awake. And so we don’t come from nothing. But once here we don’t know where we are. At first I learned the world as a book written, completed the day before my birth, not to be changed by another penstroke. And then I saw that some I knew were departing from it, never to return, and new strangers were arriving. The newcomers, if they stayed, would learn more or less of where they were. And then, in time, they too would depart, taking with them the sum of all they had learned, leaving behind them maybe a few who would remember them, and then the rememberers too would go and be gone. I see in this the order of things, nothing to complain about. I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of the wheel. I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing through a river of earth. A far cry from a written book, the world—to extend my desperate metaphor—is a book ceaselessly being written, and not in a human language. This too has not been submitted to our judgement, and it is not for us to regret. To give thanks seems truly to be the right response, for as we come and go we learn something of love, the gift and the giving of it, and this appears to lay a worth upon us, if we want it, if we accept it, to give us standing hereafter.”

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Michael Ginsberg's avatar

Still planning to do a book event in the Boston area in September? 🤞

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