Samuel Palmer, The Good Farmer, 1865

The Vividness of the Past

An excerpt from The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry

Samuel Palmer, The Good Farmer, 1865

His vision, with the finality of some physical change, has turned inward. More and more now the world as it is seems to him an apparition or a cloud that drifts, opening and closing, upon the clear, remembered lights and colors of the world as it was. The world as it is serves mostly to remind him, to turn him back along passages sometimes too well known into that other dead, mourned, unchangeable world that still lives in his mind.

— Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999), 17.

About Ryan

Ryan writes for weary pilgrims learning to follow Jesus through the wilderness. He served as a lead pastor at a church in Southern California for 8+ years. Before that, he worked as a software engineer for a decade. Today, he lives with his family in Escondido, California.

The Weary Pilgrim

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