Fuzzy Thoughts on a Book that Rocked Me

Tonight I finished a book that weighs heavy on me, heavy for the dreams never realized, and yet the hopes fulfilled. It puzzles me, and yet intrigues me all the same. As I turn over its various facets in my head, I am troubled and also comforted. Strangely and beautifully it has spoken to me-of things I never knew I needed to learn or hear, and perhaps never wanted to...and yet, it has changed me.

The book, Jayber Crow, is one not unlike the true life tale of Madeline L'Engle's Two-Part Invention, which I quoted recently. And yet, the conclusion leaves me stunned. I look back on Two Part Invention as a book that aroused tears, and heaving convulsing emotions deep from within my soul. As I read L'Engle's pains, I felt her pains in their depth and hardness; as I climbed the peaks of her greatest joys, I felt her joys in their brilliant splendor. Jayber Crow, meanwhile, aroused my restless fears and deepest questions and left me with a resolution which I can't fully grasp, and perhaps never will in this lifetime. It is, perhaps, a harder tale to read than L'Engle's, but nonetheless plays upon the same theme.

True to Wendell Berry's cloth, Jayber Crow is a tale of true joys and true sorrows, and the hardships of life worn well as a man lives into his story for all the grandeur and simplicity such a story might hold. The book speaks of young passions never realized and the wonder of growing old in a world that's confusing and increasingly distant. It talks of longing, passion, commitment, struggle, temptation, tender rest; many of the things that comprise the ins and outs of life. Jayber Crow also talks of the beauty of discovering a hope much better than anyone could ever have imagined, a well with no bottom, an ocean that goes on forever. Two of my favorite pages from reading, 356-357, near the very end, speak to such a hope revealed in their tale of the "Man in the Well." Rather than disclosing their contents (for those who might like to read), i'll provide a small (treasured) excerpt:

Listen. There is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing. He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man whose work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman forsaken in a nursing home in California. He believes that those who make their bed in Hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani." Have mercy. -p. 357 Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry

The story is powerful, and yet hard to endure to its conclusion. But it was worth it, although the journey filled my chest with an aching pain and my throat with a deep thirst. Jayber Crow's ending reminds me of the closing from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding. Rather than trying to make sense of something I can hardly put into words, I'll close with Eliot's:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

-T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, from "The Four Quartets"