Stories Out of Time

 

Church near the Rock of Dunamase, County Laois in Ireland

What follows are excerpts from Jonathan Rogers' article "Wendell Barry and the Romanians: Story and Place".

"The point of Wendell Berry’s whole project, it seems to me, is that every place, if you settle down and look at it, if you pay attention, is a thin place. After he finished his education in California, Wendell Berry moved back to the Kentucky County where both sides of his family had lived for five generations, and he said, 'I’m going to keep looking at and listening to this place—this landscape, these voices, these folkways, these old stories—until it gives up its secrets.'"

"In his Port William novels, Wendell Berry is doing something very similar to what those Romanian villagers were doing with their story of the jilted fairy. Berry writes of a forgotten little place, and in so doing demonstrates that there are vast things afoot—much more than meets the eye."

"The job of a storyteller, you might say, is to make thin places, places where we can see truer things than we normally see in the world around us. To do that requires that we pay attention to the world as we find it. We need to look and keep looking, confident that the truth will tell itself.

Big, eternal truths are pulsing and surging just below the surface of things, forever threatening to bust through. And the surface of things is scarcely adequate to conceal them."