Andy Catlett Quotes

“[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“…For many years now, that way of living has been scorned, and over the last 40 or 50 years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent to some extent on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably – could even have improved it. Now, we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress. Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world, in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world. And that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable. An economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature, or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it. The world I knew as a boy was flawed surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“But on that morning in 1943 I had no premonition of such an ending. In my innocence, I thought only that the world the mules were drawing us into was a truer world than the world of Hargrave, and I liked it better. It was a world placed unforgettably within the weather, in the unqualified daylight and darkness. I thought it had always been and would always be pretty much as it was.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“It was as though a curtain had fallen on a stage and the credulous audience (I, that is to say) was now in a different world from the one I had waked up in only a short time ago. The world I was in now was an older one that had been in existence a long time, though it would last only a few more years. The time was about over when a boy traveling into the Port William community might be met by a team of mules and a wagon. Dick Watson would die in the fall of 1945 and Grandpa Catlett in the late winter of 1946. By 1950 or so most of the horse and mule teams would have departed from the country. The men and women who had known only the old ways were departing fast. I knew well at that time that the two worlds existed and that I lived in both. During the school year I lived mostly in Hargrave, the county seat at the confluence of the rivers. Hargrave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in the orbit of the tiny village of Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“On the other hand, I was good, a model boy, at least when I was in sight, on my visits to both sets of my grandparents. In their houses, for me, peace reigned, and I could even count on being spoiled a little as a just compensation for my goodness. And so of course I loved those visits, especially when I could go alone.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“There is such a thing as lovesickness for good horses and mules, and for this there is no cure. People who operate machines know nothing like it. This creaturely love can keep one interested all day long in every motion of a good team or a good saddle horse. And not only all day long, but all year round and all life long.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets." -Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett Early Travels, p. 93”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“So they greeted me, made much of me, gave me very astutely my credit rating, and so reminded me how much, how much more than they knew, I wished to grow and fill out and do work worthy of my dinner. When all their backs were turned again, I felt for myself the place where Rufus’s hard handprint still lay on my thigh, and I had to acknowledge that it was sure enough a rather grasshopperly appendage.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“Well, Dick,” Jess Brightleaf said, “looks like you all met that bus all right. I reckon you got there in plenty of time.” Dick laughed his laugh —“Ho-ho-ho!”— that meant he wasn’t going to tell all that he might. “Yessir, Mr. Jessie. We was out at the pike wasn’t even day yet.” He would tell me later that Grandpa had been talking about meeting the bus for two or three days. That I would be coming by myself was a matter that he had taken very seriously. That my father would have entrusted me alone to such a contraption as a bus had not met Grandpa’s approval. He did not understand internal combustion as a motive force, and he regarded it with a mixture of deference and awe and deep suspicion.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“That those two worlds were in mortal contention had never occurred to me. When in a few years one had entirely consumed the other, so that no place anywhere would ever again be satisfied to be what it was, I was surprised, and I am more surprised now by the rapidity of the change than I was then. In only a few years the world of pavement, speed, and universal dissatisfaction had extended itself into nearly every place and nearly every mind, and the old world of the mule team and wagon was simply gone, leaving behind it a scatter of less and less intelligible relics.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“In the secrecy of my heart I imagined my own marriage as a sort of official permit to adore some lady as beautiful and kind as Hannah, perhaps in the manner of one of the knights of the Round Table, and to do daring deeds that would cause her to adore me.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“I stirred it and tasted it again, and she was right. The sugar and cream made it taste more like it smelled. It only needed to be a little sweeter, and when she went away I added two more spoonsful of sugar. It went down very pleasantly after that, though I was already wondering how much my extravagance with the sugar might have hurt “the war effort.” My conscience was not always alert, but when alerted it went eagerly about its duty.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“For I had not grown, as I preferred to think, into the vaguest semblance of adulthood, but rather into a serious and lasting form of nuisancehood. As even I had noticed, I could not be good at home and at school at the same time, which meant that I was a worry to my parents all the time. At school I had become a fourth-grade Thomas Paine, striking blows for liberty, which of course earned me in return blows of yardsticks, rulers, and other pedagogical weapons, which I welcomed as distractions from the established order. At home I was actuated, like Daniel Boone, by a desire for elbow room, and our house seemed to me to be growing smaller by the day, as densely crowded by the other five members of our family as if it had been no bigger than a phone booth. And so I can’t think now that my parents were grieving over my departure or that they were going to miss me much.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Center Point Premier Fiction (Large Print)) by Berry, Wendell (2007) Hardcover

“You’d have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels