Okay, I know that title doesn't make any sense, so bear with me. I started reading the Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry and had to stop less than three chapters into it because it was just TOO well written.
Seriously. Some days you just can't handle such a powerful, beautiful tear-jerker.
I frequently put books down without finishing. I give them a 50 page test (sometimes more if I'm feeling generous) and if they don't capture my attention, they're goners. This is the first time that I've stopped a book because it's too good.
Wendell Berry is amazing. His fictitious Port William series speaks so deeply and poignantly about community, roots, place, identity and time. Those books have more truth in them than any non-fiction book I've read trying to address the same subjects.
And yet, with the truths he writes about comes so much sadness. I can handle a tearful ending, but this one started out so beautifully sad, that I was crying by chapter 2. It's about an old man getting lost in the details of his past as the present blurs in his failing age. The losses and joys of generations get woven together in this old man's narrative, till your heart just about breaks for this old man whose whole world has slipped away.
It's impossible for me to read a book like this without seeing my life flash before my eyes like his. It makes me look at my young family and think how soon this precious time will change.
And yet what this book does (and what the best books are capable of), is it compresses time, so that you are dealing with all the joys and sadness and change of this community and this old man's lifetime all at once. I am so thankful that this is not how I have to experience my life. It is sensory overload to try to absorb it all at once.
I am also thankful that real life comes at a person so much slower, and with so many more mundane details, even if it contains the same change and tragedy and love and loss.
