Begin, Belong, Become, Behold, Bestow, and Begin Again with Jayber Crow
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 10 minutes
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15-20 minutes
“It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw.” - Virginia Woolf
Pause.
Take a few deep breaths while looking at the photo of Wendell Berry below.
Wendell Berry, Henry County, Kentucky, 1970s. (James Baker Hall)
Prompt.
Begin:
I fell in love with Wendell Berry’s (August 5, 1934-August 31, 2026) fiction before I cared about his poetry or nonfiction. Friends brought me into Berry’s words about 20 years ago, and Jayber Crow has been my favorite novel of his ever since I’ve been reading him. I’m going to share excerpts from Jayber Crow belong using my Belong, Become, Behold, Bestow framework to show you some of what I love about Berry’s fiction and to honor his life and work.
Belong:
“Barbering is a social business; it involves conversation just about by necessity. For me, after Uncle Stanley died, grave digging was a solitary business. Just once in a while I would get caught with a grave to dig on one of my busy days at the shop and would have to hire a hand or two, but mostly, up in the graveyard, I worked alone. It was hard work, and often it was sad work, for as a rule I would be digging and filling the grave of somebody I knew; often it would be the grave of somebody I liked or loved.
It was a strange thing to cut out the blocks of sod and then dig my way to the dark layer where the dead lie. I feel a little uneasy in calling them “the dead,” for I am as mystified as anybody by the transformation known as death, and the Resurrection is more real to me than most things I have not yet seen. I understand that people’s dead bodies are not exactly them, and yet as I dug down to where they were, I would be mindful of them, and respectful, and would feel a curious affection for them all. They all had belonged here once, and they were so much more numerous than the living. I thought and thought about them. It was endlessly moving to me to walk among the stones, reading the names of people I had known in my childhood, the names of people I was kin to but had never known, and (pretty soon) the names of people I knew and cared about and had buried myself. Some of the older stones you could no longer read because of weathering and the growth of moss. It was a place of finality and order. The people there had lived their little passage of time in this world, had become what they became, and now could be changed only by forgiveness and mercy. The misled, the disappointed, the sinners of all the sins, the hopeful, the faithful, the loving, the doubtful, the desperate, the grieved and the comforted, the young and the old, the bad and the good—all, sufferers unto death, had lain down there together. Some were there who had served the community better by dying than by living. Why I should have felt tender toward them all was not clear to me, but I did.”
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: A Novel
Become:
“Sometimes in my mind I would be sitting again in Dr. Ardmire’s office, as if I had returned to 1935 out of my later life to give him my report. I finally knew, I told him, why Christ’s prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed that prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed His divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal. And I could see Dr. Ardmire looking straight at me with that distant, amused light in his eyes, and I could hear him say, ‘Well. And now what?’”
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: A Novel
Behold:
If the classroom was not my natural habitat, the library pretty much was. The library was a long room across the back of Brother Whitespade’s house. There were lots of windows along the east wall, and comfortable chairs in front of the windows, tables here and there, and several tall cases of books. The books had mainly been donated, I think, and some of them practically nobody would have wanted to read, but there were some good ones too. The librarian was a nice lady named Mrs. Eades, who was hospitable and quiet and kind. Now and then our teachers would send us to the library on some project or other, but there were times too when we were free just to go: Saturday mornings, and every night between supper and study hall.
Back in a corner between a bookcase and one of the east windows, there was a small table where I liked to sit and read. It was one of the best places in the world to be on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the winter. And I like to remember sitting there on a bright Saturday morning in the spring, with the window open and the sun shining in and the spirea bushes in bloom outside. At first I read books about horses and dogs, because I wanted a horse and a dog. And then I read several books about a boy named William Greenhill, an orphan like me, and then The Swiss Family Robinson and The Boy’s King Arthur. I read the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two more orphans, and Rip Van Winkle, and David Copperfield, another orphan.
One day I found in a trash can the hinder part of a little anthology of American poems. The cover and a lot of pages had been torn away, so that my copy began:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells ...
I thought tintinnabulation was the finest word I had ever seen. I kept that piece of a book with me until I came back to Port William. I still have it.”
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: A Novel
Bestow:
“I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn’t know I had ever thought. “Forty years” or “Fifty years” or “Sixty years,” I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.
I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.”
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: A Novel
Begin Again:
I hope this makes you want to read or reread Jayber Crow. I’m officially reading it again as of today.
Practice.
Take notes for 5-10 minutes using the questions below. —Which sentences above make you curious?
—Which sentences ring true to you and your life and experiences?
—What do these sentences offer you?
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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