Friday 6 November 2015

A DYING MAN

'Once he woke me to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. "Andy," he said. "Listen." He said the psalm to me. I lay listening to his old, slow voice coming through the dark to me, saying that he walked through the valley of the shadow of death and was not afraid. It stood my hair up. I had known that psalm all my life. I had heard it and said it a thousand times. But until then I had always felt that it came from a long way off, some place I had not lived. Now, hearing him speak it, it seemed to me for the first time to utter itself in our tongue and to wear our dust. My grandfather slept again after that, but I did not.' 
Wendell Berry, 'That Distant Land' in That Distant Land, p.313.