There’s a beautiful, sad story called “Stand by Me” by Wendell Berry in The Atlantic summer 2008 fiction issue. The voice is first person rural poetry, simple and pragmatic, and tells a story about brothers and sons and death and living through it. It’s the kind of story that is either beautiful or cheaply awful, depending on how good the writer is. In this case, it’s beautiful. Here’s a passage that I wanted to think about again: “They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead were alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them because they were always living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same.”
Tags: Wendell Berry
