Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

by Wright Thompson

More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding—modern, fancy words that mean lie.

Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past.

Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will. That’s what Thomas Wolfe

meant, I think. We can’t go home again because the home we rem...

Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patterns that turn into rituals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.

“Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance?” Merton wrote. “Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our disconnect in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction.”

“When tomorrow comes,” it read, “this day will be gone forever, leaving something in its place I have traded for it.”