Old Memories: Amusing and Historical

“The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to - because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.””

— Unknown

“Now when he walked in his fields and pastures and woodlands he was tramping into his mind the shape of the land, his thought becoming indistinguishable from it, so that when he came to die his intelligence would subside into it like its own spirit.””

— Unknown

“She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart.””

— Unknown

“It is a Sunday morning early in the May of 1889. The weather is clear and warm. There has been rain, and the littlest streams are brimming and shining. The spring is at its height. The grass of the yard and the pastures is lush, the green of it so new that it gleams in the sun. The trees are heavily leafed, their new growth still tender, unblemished. And the whole country lies beneath an intricate tapestry of bird song. He is on his way to church - one of the pilgrimages that he occasionally makes in uneasy compensation for the extravagances of Saturday night.””

— Unknown

“The modern ignorance is in people’s assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.””

— Unknown

“Old Jack has become a worry to them. In the last several weeks his mind seems to have begun to fail. They have been watching him with some anxiety””

— Unknown

“He gave him the steadiness, and he gave him the little uneasiness and the pressure, that a young man can only get from an older man’s knowing eye.””

— Unknown

“Mat felt the change upon himself. Now he was the oldest, and the longest memory was his. Now between him and the grave stood no other man. From here on he would find the way for himself.””

— Unknown

“Or rather that crisp command fell upon the current of his thought like a dry leaf on the surface of a deeply flowing stream, to be borne forty years away.””

— Unknown