Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

The girls of her day, I think, must have been like well-wrapped gifts, to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. “Well! What’s this?”

She had told me exactly what to do if ever anybody got fresh with me. I was to remove their hand firmly from wherever they had put it, look them directly in the eye, and say, “Are you ready to try that in front of Grandmam?”

How can you be happy, how can you live, when all the things that make you happy grieve you nearly to death?

But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

To know that I was known by a new living being, who had not existed until she was made in my body by my desire and brought forth into the world by my pain and strength—that changed me.

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed.

How we are is “Fine.” There are always a few who will recite their complaints, but the proper answer to “How are you?” is “Fine.”

Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one.

Love in this world doesn’t come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

And now, looking back, it seems clear that when the tractors came, the people began to go.

But we were together in it also because, from time to time, often enough, we were in it by desire, we met entirely in it and were one flesh. What that was and is and means is not altogether going to be found in words.

What Nathan had done was what should have been done. The place never looked as if something had been changed. It looked right. It looked the way it ought to have looked. It looked right because the right man was doing the work. If the wrong man had done it, Andy, even you would have noticed.

We had often enough the pleasure of making up, because we fell out often enough. But now, looking back, it is hard to say why we fell out, or what we fell out about, or why whatever we fell out about ever mattered. Even then it was sometimes hard to say.

You have had this life and no other. You have had this life with this man and no other. What would it have been to have had a different life with a different man? You will never know. That makes the world forever a mystery, and you will just have to be content for it to be that way.

We quarreled because we loved each other, I have no doubt of that. We were trying to become somehow the same person, one flesh, and we often failed. When distance came between us, we would blame it on each other. And here is a wonder. I maybe never loved him so much or yearned toward him so much as when I was mad at him. It’s not a simple thing, this love.

The knowledge of his desire and of myself as desirable and of my desire would come over me. He would come to me as my guest, and I would be his welcomer.

What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on.

The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

I don’t know, but I have had to ask. Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different. Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place. Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm. Doesn’t that finally unmake everything that has been made? Isn’t that the loose thread that unravels the whole garment?

He got good grades in school and satisfied his teachers, but what he learned seemed to have less and less to do with school. If there was something to be learned, especially in a subject he liked, he learned it. If they assigned him a textbook, he learned what was in it. But he was going ahead more or less on his own, just interested and eager.

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, “hopeth all things.” But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

The children were allowed to be as rowdy as they pleased as long as they were outdoors.

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love.

“Dear Hannah, I’m going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.”

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

You went from an ordinary day in the ordinary world into the world of war, an exploding world where you lived inescapably hour after hour, day after day, killing as you were bidden to do, suffering as you were bidden to do, dying as you were bidden to do. You were there to kill until you were killed. And this would finally seem to be the only world there was.

You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering.

It is this body of our suffering that Christ was born into, to suffer it Himself and to fill it with light, so that beyond the suffering we can imagine Easter morning and the peace of God on little earthly homelands such as Port William and the farming villages of Okinawa.

People are living as if they think they are in a movie. They are all looking in one direction, toward “a better place,” and what they see is no thicker than a screen.

I want to leave here openhanded, with only the ancient blessing, “Good-bye. My love to you all.”