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Voices from the Deepity: got any pithy quotes to share?

Since retiring I’ve become a big fan of novels for the sidelong glimpse of the implicit meanings of life they provide. I read Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow last year and what follows is from my favorite passage. At the end, in the very last sentence, is the best description of a human soul I’ve ever read.

“.. it is hard to look at the river in its calm, just after daylight or just before dark, and believe that history has happened to it. The river, the river itself, leaves marks but bears none. It is only the water flowing in the path that other water has worn.

Or is that other water really “other”, or is it the same water always running, flowing always toward the gathering of all waters, and always rising and returning again, and again flowing? I knew this river first when I was a little boy, and I know it now when I am an old man once again living beside it … and almost seventy years! … and always when i have watched it I have been entranced and mystified. What is it? Is it the worn trough of itself that is a feature of the land and is marked on maps, or is it the water flowing? Or is it the land itself that over time is shaped by the flowing water, and it caught by no map?

The surface of the quieted river as I thought in those old days at Squire’s Landing, as I think now, is like a window looking into another world that is like this one except that it is quiet. Its quietness makes it seem perfect. The ripples are like the slats of a blind or a shutter through which we we see imperfectly what is perfect. Though that other world can be seen only momentarily, it looks everlasting. As the ripples become more agitated, the window darkens and the other world is hidden. As I did not know then but know now, the surface of the water is like a living soul, which is easy to disturb, is often disturbed, but, growing calm, shows what it was, is, and will be.”

MarkWD 7 Jan 6
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Nice quote, and very true. I have problems with the word soul, and would prefer, "personality" but I go with the flow of the river. If you like deepities, and want to read or share them, then there is a, "quotes" group on the site which is one of the more active ones.

I like this one about the first cold days of spring in childhood, and again, especially for the last line.

"A spring day came when I began to know that this was not the first spring of the world. That I had lived through other winters - perhaps seven or eight of them - and known a sudden tender day like this one, when I stood with flowers in my hands, gazing up at the haystack that rose dingy on an island of new green sod, surrounded by a sea of thaw water. ------

My thumb and fingers would not meet around the violet stems, I had picked so many, and were cold with tightly keeping them. ------

Over all the sky was tautened in one vast blue arc. And I wondered, for the first time. Why is it so sad to be so happy ? "

D. C. Peattie

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