“There have been times, then and later too, when I thought I could cry forever. But I haven’t done it. There was war and rumors of war. ‘There was war in Heaven once,’ as Aunt Fanny would sometimes remind us. But there was something else too.

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones. Little Margaret was calling me into life. A little ahead of me in time still, Nathan would be calling me into life.

At first, as the months went by, it was shameful to me when I would realized that without my consent, almost without my knowledge, something had made me happy. And then I learned to think, when those times would come, ‘Well, go ahead. If you’re happy, then be happy. No big happiness came to me yet, but the little happinesses did come, and they came from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things: the baby, sunlight, breezes, animals and birds, daily work, rest when I was tired, food, strands of fog in the hollows early in the morning, butterflies, flowers. The flowers didn’t have to be dahlias and roses either, but just the weeds blooming in the fields, the daisies and the yarrow. I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want. And so, unknowingly, I was being prepared for Nathan and for my life with him, when that time would come.

Virgil was missing, and nobody ever found him or learned what happened to him. And the girl I was when I fell in love with him and married him began to be missing too, becoming a memory along with him. I was changing, and the world was changing. I was going on into time, where Virgil no longer was. Now, looking back after so many years, I still can recognize that young couple, I know them well, and I pity them for their lost life. But I am no longer one of them. Those lovers fled away a long time ago.”

{From Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, p.57-58}

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