Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

And what of Caleb? Caleb eventually became Dr. Coulter. He became a professor, teaching agriculture to fewer and fewer students who were actually going to farm. He became an expert with a laboratory and experimental plots, a man of reputation. But as I know, and as he knows in his own heart and thoughts, Caleb is incomplete. He didn’t love farming enough to be a farmer, much as he loved it, but he loved it too much to be entirely happy doing anything else. He is disappointed in himself. He is regretful in some dark passage of his mind that he thinks only he knows about, but he can’t hide it from his mother. I can see it in his face as plain as writing. There is the same kind of apology in him that you see in some of the sweeter drunks. He is always trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.