Wendell Berry

Nathan Coulter deserves a full book review, though I may read more of the Port Royal series before eulogizing the initial offering. But briefly, I greatly enjoyed the book. I've paraphrased the quote below to a number of friends already, and was happy to find it requoted online since I thought the book was so good that I gave it away soon after reading it. Really, can you find a better recommendation than that???

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

E.B. White

This is just a quote, stolen from Esther ("from E. B. White, who is commenting on the centralization of schools and transportation to school via bus, in 1940"). I recently visited the Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine, where one of their more frequently referenced exhibits is a 20-minute video on lobstermen narrated by E.B. White. It was a unique treat to hear his narration of the day in the life of a lobsterman. There is something so practical and simple in appreciating our daily work even though the work of others can seem exotic by virtue of unfamiliarity, habitat or culture.

"Whether the improvement is general nobody knows. Certainly there is something lost. One thing that is lost is the mere business of walking to school, which is something in itself. In my community scholars still get round on the hoof. They pass our house at seven in the morning, clicking along in a ground-eating stride. Some of them make a four-mile trip to school--eight miles in all....In all the time I've been driving these roads I've never been asked for a ride, which is almost unbelievable considering the distances that must be covered, often in zero weather or in storm. Walking is natural for these children, just as motoring is for most others....I enjoy living among pedestrians who have an instinctive and habitual realization that there is more to a journey than the mere fact of the arrival. If the consolidated school served by busses destroys that in our children I don't know that we are ahead of the game after all."

E.B. White, One Man's Meat, pp. 110-111