“We had often enough the pleasure of making up, because we fell out often enough.  But now, looking back, it is hard to say why we fell out, or what we fell out about, or why whatever we fell out about ever mattered.  Even then it was sometimes hard to say.

One time we were fussing and Nathan looked at me right in the middle of it and said, ‘Hannah, what in the hell got us started on this?’  I said, ‘I don’t know.’  ‘Well, I don’t know either,’ he said.  ‘So I think I’m going to quit.’  ‘Well, go ahead and quit,’ I said.  He said, ‘I already did.’  And that was the last word that time.

You have this life and no other.  You have had this life with this man and no other.  What would it have been to have had a different life with a different man?  You will never know.  That makes the world forever a mystery, and you will just have to be content for it to be that way.

We quarreled because we loved each other, I have no doubt of that.  We were trying to become somehow the same person, one flesh, and we often failed.  When distance came between us, we would blame it on each other.  And here is a wonder.  I maybe never loved him so much or yearned toward him so much as when I was mad at him.  It’s not a simple thing, this love.

It wasn’t always anger that came between us.  Work could come between us.  Thoughts could come between us.  Feeling in different ways about the children could come between us.  We would go apart, Nathan into whatever loneliness was his, I into mine.  We would be like stars or planets in their orbits moving apart.  And then we would come into alignment again, the sun and the moon and the earth.  And then it would be as if we were coming together for the first time.  It was like the time when I had decided that I would belong to whatever it was that we would be together, and I looked straight back at him at last.  He would look at me with a grin that I knew.  He would say, ‘Is it all right?’  And I would say, ‘It’s all right.’  The knowledge of his desire and of myself as desirable and of my desire would come over me.  He would come to me as my guest, and I would be his welcomer…

The room of love is another world.  You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock.  It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together.  You come together to the day’s end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid.  You take it all in your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift.  The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together.  What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

If you want to know why even in telling of the trouble and sorrow I am giving thanks, this is why.”

{From Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, p. 108-110}

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