is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?
IV
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
V
And by it we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.
Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude.
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.
VI
And there is no escaping that return.
From the order of nature we return to the order—and the disorder—of humanity.
From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.
One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human.
And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.
In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.
In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.
VII
Order is the only possibility of rest.
The made order must seek the given order, and find its place in it.
The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field, so that the wheel of life will turn, and the dying be met by the newborn.
The scattered members must be brought together.
Desire will always outreach the possible. But to fulfill the possible is to enlarge it.
The possible, fulfilled, is timely in the world, eternal in the mind.
Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?
But one is afraid that there will be no rest until the work is finished and the house is in order, the farm is in order, the town is in order, and all loved ones are well.
But it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.
To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure.
It is despair that sees the work failing in one’s own failure.
This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.
VIII
There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers.
The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
In ignorance is hope. If we had known the difficulty, we would not have learned even so little.
Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to.
They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.
IX
The teachings of unsuspected teachers belong to the task, and are its hope.
The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.
Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.
Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.
Order is only the possibility of rest.
1977
Part II
A REMARKABLE MAN
I
“Nate Shaw” is the pseudonym of a black farmer born in Alabama in 1885. He grew up as a field hand and sharecropper in the cotton belt. Because of his industry, ambition, and intelligence, he prospered. By the early 1930s he owned a good team of mules, good farming equipment, two automobiles; his family was well cared for; he was on the way to owning an eighty-acre farm. At that time he joined the Sharecroppers Union. He took a stand against some sheriff’s deputies who had come to attach and carry off a neighbor’s stock. The confrontation ended in a “shootin frolic,” for which Nate Shaw was sent to prison for twelve years. He stayed the full term, refusing a parole bargain by which he would have had to leave his home country and move to Birmingham, and was released in 1945. Older, drastically reduced in means, he returned to farming, “a mule farmin man to the last,” though the tractor era had come in during his absence. In March of 1971 he began to tell his story to a young white man, Theodore Rosengarten. The telling, recorded on tapes, took 120 hours; the result, much edited, is this remarkable book. Our debt to Mr. Rosengarten is large.
It
