Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world.

Wendell Berry

The Edge of the World

Topic: Life Beyond Death & the Spirit World

But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. It is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, on August 5, 1934. This region has not only been his lifelong home but also the inspiration for much of his writing. He grew up understanding the rhythms of the land, a knowledge that would deeply influence his roles as both a writer and a farmer.

He has produced a diverse range of works, spanning poetry, essays, and novels. A consistent theme across his writing is the connection between humans and nature, informed by his firsthand experience working on his Kentucky farm. As an academic, Berry taught English, further establishing his foothold in the literary community.

Beyond his personal achievements, Berry's family has played a significant role in his life. His close relationships, especially with those who share his ties to Kentucky, have further anchored his love for the land and community. While he has been a voice for sustainable farming and conservation, his writings also often touch upon the intricate dynamics of family and community life in rural America.

Humanism, Arts and Sciences
Jayber Crow

Berry, Wendell. Jayber Crow. Counterpoint LLC, 2000. [—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow].

Wendell Berry

Theme: Our Soul

About Wendell Berry’s Quote [Commentary]

“Love, sooner or later, forces us out of time.” Berry starts by identifying love as a force that goes beyond the ticking clock and calendar days. It transcends the idea of time as a limit, pushing us to experience something that feels more permanent and meaningful. This speaks to love’s unique role in human life, a role that goes beyond the ordinary and taps into the profound.

“It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive.” In this part, Berry uses the analogy of a pregnant woman to describe love’s encompassing, forgiving nature. A mother-to-be is a vessel of life and potential, willing to go through pain and forgive her child’s future wrongs. Similarly, love is comprehensive and anticipatory, fully invested in our humanity and its complexities. It’s a form of grace that accepts us, flaws and all.

“It is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.” Here, Berry concludes by telling us that love is both present in our everyday world and yet operates on a different, eternal plane. While we experience love in our daily lives—through our relationships, actions, and emotions—it has a dual nature. It gives us a sense of belonging right where we are, while also serving as a gateway to something timeless and enduring.

By threading these different aspects together, Berry paints a full portrait of love. He shows us that love is not just an emotion but a transformative force, one that defies time, forgives deeply, and has its roots in the eternal. It’s not just a part of our human experience; it is the touchstone for something much more grand and everlasting.

Jayber Crow, Commentary by Andrew Petiprin [Excerpts]

Set in Berry’s fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, the title character’s hidden, inner life explains what his neighbors, who love him, dismiss as eccentricities. As someone born in another town and unattached by way of marriage and family, Jayber’s decades-long presence in Port William has the quality of a permanent observer. As the town barber, Jayber hears all the stories.

But Jayber has two other jobs in Port William: gravedigger and church janitor. And around the midway point of the novel, Berry invites us into the experience of Jayber’s sacred duties in the cemetery and in the sanctuary. The chapter “The Beautiful Shore” feels a bit like a Flannery O’Connor short story. And like the best of O’Connor’s tales, this single chapter from Berry is full of complicated grace.

“The Beautiful Shore” begins outside in the graveyard before moving in. Jayber lives in a kind of communion of saints. He enjoys the silence and solitude of digging; and yet he is never alone. Not only does he feel a connection to the names on the headstones, but he notices how his workplace sometimes becomes “a very social place for the living,” as people bump into each other visiting their respective loved ones. Jayber is also full of hope about what has happened to the people whose bodies lie beneath his feet. He confesses,

“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.”

―Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (excerpt from The Beautiful Shore).

“The soul, in its loneliness, hopes only for “salvation.” And yet what is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world? These are all the works of God, and it is therefore the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them. The world is certainly thought of as a place of spiritual trial, but it is also the confluence of soul and body, word and flesh, where thoughts must become deeds, where goodness must be enacted. This is the great meeting place, the narrow passage where spirit and flesh, word and world, pass into each other. The Bible’s aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony. What else can be meant by the resurrection of the body? The body should be “filled with light,” perfected in understanding. And so everywhere there is the sense of consequence, fear and desire, grief and joy. What is desirable is repeatedly defined in the tensions of the sense of consequence.”

—Wendell Berry [The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays].

The Edge of the World

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