Remembering by Wendell Berry Read Free Book Online Page A

always arriving sea, the sea and the sky reaching westward, past the land’s edge, out of sight.
    He darkens the room and goes out into the dim hallway and the interior quiet of the building, away from the street sounds. The long hall is carpeted, and he goes silently past the shut doors of rooms where people are sleeping or absent, who would know which? There is an almost palpable unwaking around him as he goes past the blank doors, intent upon his own silence, as though, his presence known to nobody, he is not there himself.
    At the elevator he stops and looks at the button saying “Down.” But he does not push it. He does not want to hear the jolt of machinery as the elevator begins to rise, or the long groan of its rising, or the jolt of its stopping, the doors clanking open. He does not want to enter that little box and see it close upon him and be carried passively downward in it.
    He goes on along the corridor and lets himself out into the stairwell. He has made no noise, but now his steps echo around him as he descends
the rightward turning stairs, five floors, to the lobby, where the carpet silences them again.
    The lobby is deserted. The empty chairs sit in conversational groups of two or three, their cushions dented. There is no one behind the desk. The clock over the desk says twenty after four.
    What have I done with the time?
    Remembering as if far back, he knows what he did with it. He stood up there in the room like a graven image of himself, telling over the catalogue of his complaints. There is a country inside him where his complaints live and do their work, where they invite him to come, offering their enticements and tidbits, the self-justifications of anger, the self-justifications of self-humiliation, the coddled griefs.
    When he looks at the clock again, it is almost four-thirty. This is happening to my soul. This is a part of the life history of my soul. Outside in the street a car passes, stops for the light at the corner, its engine idling, and then turns and goes on. He must go. He must get outside. He is filled suddenly with panic, as though the doors have begun to grow rapidly smaller.

3. Remembering
    In the street the wind comes fresh against him, smelling a little of the sea. He stands outside the hotel entrance, the street all his own for the moment. Off in the distance he can hear a siren baying, and then another joining it. A taxi eases up to the intersection nearby, waits for the light, and eases on. Two or three blocks away a garbage compressor utters a loud yawn followed by something like a swallow. And underneath the noises there is a silence as of the sleep of almost everybody, and beside or within the silence a low mechanical hum.
    A frail-looking woman passes by, drunk and walking unsteadily but with an attempt anyway at dignity, holding her jacket closed at the throat as if she is cold. Watching her, he feels his silence. An unknown world would have to be crossed for him to speak to her. And yet something in him for which he has no word cries out toward her, for the world between them fails in their silence, who are alone and heavy laden and without rest. This is the history of souls. This is the earthly history of immortal souls. He begins to walk slowly past the deserted entries, the darkened windows. A truck passes, shifting into a lower gear as the grade steepens. Somewhere there is an outcry, a man’s voice, distressed and urgent, unintelligible. A car engine starts. The garbage truck again raises its wail.
    Other night walkers appear, meet him and pass and go on, or go by on the cross streets. They are far between, alone. He can hear their steps, each one, echoing in the spaces around him. It is the time of night, he
thinks, when the dying die — O greens, and fields, and trees, farewell, farewell! — and the dead lie stillest in their graves, when the dying who are not yet to die begin again to live.
    A man overtakes and passes him, carrying a lunch