Being in Place

 Continuing my cultivated admiration for the work of Wendell Berry, I just completed Nathan Coulter, one of his earlier novels (1960, reprinted 1985). The book opens a window into the world of Port William, the agrarian community in northern Kentucky that mirrors Berry's home and culture. Its narrative style, elegant without being sparse, keeps my attention because it paints so well the mundane details of life. I suspect that many novels keep us rapt with a cavalcade of the improbable and the fantastic. To me, so used to my culture's parade of the shocking, the story of a life stripped down to essentials carries its own fascination.

Berry's plot gives very little quarter to the thoughts of his characters, and his characters give very little quarter to chatter or diatribe. Our attraction to them and their way of life emerges from participation in the basic chores of life--eating, planting, fishing, harvesting, listening to the rain--and witnessing unassuming expressions of love--cooking, working, laughing, teaching. In a brief 180 pages we come to own Nathan Coulter as a friend not because of his exceptionalism but because he unselfconsciously reflects to us the essence of what it means to be human, to be tied to family and land, and to recognize the power of belonging.

Nathan's simple humanity allows Berry, at last, to let the seeds of observation grow into a flower of wisdom. Nathan observes, after family conflict drives his brother away to begin his own life:

"Brother was gone, and he wouldn't be back. And things that had been so before never would be so again. We were the way we were; nothing could make us any different, and we suffered because of it. Things happened to us the way they did because we were ourselves." (pg 158)

In spite of my culture's ambition always to be changing for the better, believing that our natures can change through self-help and therapy and meditation, Nathan's assessment of the human condition does not occasion despair. From the story we glean that there is wisdom in accepting the world, the land, and one's condition as it is. Nathan's experience stands in humble criticism of the neurotic addictions of our age.

Clear vision sees so far as to observe the worldly end of all humanity. Nathan's voice again:

"I thought of the spring running there all that time . . . . still running while Grandpa's grandfather and his father got old and died. And running while Grandpa drank its water and waited his turn. When I thought of it that way I knew I was waiting my turn too. . . . In a way the spring was like him, a part of his land; I couldn't divide the spring from the notch it had cut in the hill. Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring . . . We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead." (pg 179-180)

Nathan Coulter at last reckons with the fullness of human life: the destiny of our bodies to sink again into the soil. Even if the world and its cycles do not change, we belong to it, like the spring and the rock through which it cuts simply by following the pull of gravity.

Nathan Coulter leaves off while Nathan still lives with his parents. Berry's most recent book (The Art of Loading Brush) tells an end of sorts to the story of Nathan Coulter. I know from that story that Nathan is different from the generations past. His acceptance of death and the way things are births in him a compassion that is equally a critique of and a gift from his family. What never changes is that growth and wisdom must follow the pace and patterns of the land. Rushing toward an imagined goal yields a spindly and hollow harvest. To discover what could be we must attend to what is.

Thanks to Warren Muller, who found Nathan Coulter in his book-sifting and sent it to me as a gift.