“That is my story, my giving of thanks.” So begins Wendell Berry’s 2004 novel Hannah Coulter, narrated by the titular character, a 79-year-old lady recounting her life’s story. It’s a work of thanksgiving, and it’s a work about thanksgiving—how it’s practiced, how it’s realized, and what occurs when it provides strategy to stressed eager for “a greater place.”
As such, it raises questions pertinent to at this time’s vacation. Thanksgiving preparations usually revolve round sensible to-do checklist gadgets, from reserving journey lodging and coordinating household schedules to cooking and cleansing earlier than friends arrive. Studying Hannah Coulter reminds us {that a} deeper preparation is named for. What sort of an schooling equips us to present thanks?
Fashionable Individuals have a tendency to consider schooling by way of cognitive improvement—attained by courses, lectures, and assignments, and measured by grades, standardized checks, and levels. Hannah’s story gives a special view, revealing the primacy of an schooling in advantage with out which human flourishing is unimaginable.
Formal education can foster ethical schooling, however it could actually additionally thwart it. Via reflections on her personal formation, in addition to that of her kids, Hannah sheds gentle on the love, constancy, and cultural transmission that represent an schooling in gratitude. On the identical time, her story cautions towards the progressive concepts which have come to animate the trendy pursuit of schooling, threatening the traditions of thanksgiving Individuals maintain pricey.
Discovering the Golden Thread
From a sure perspective, Hannah’s story may learn like a litany of grievances, reasonably than causes for gratitude. She suffers the dying of her mom at a younger age; mistreatment by a depraved stepmother; widowhood not as soon as, however twice; and abandonment by her grownup kids, who all transfer away. But Hannah sees her grief not because the defining mark of her life however as a signpost of a deeper actuality.
“What’s the thread that holds all of it collectively?” she asks amid the losses of World Conflict II, questioning if grief is the one fixed in life. She as an alternative concludes that love is the “golden thread,” shining out even within the darkness of grief. Certainly, the aching vacancy of grief itself “signifies the enjoyment that has been right here, and the love.” And so Hannah’s story, although generally “fill[ed] to the brim with sorrow,” is a narrative of affection.
It’s the story of the great thing about marriage, adoption right into a welcoming household of in-laws, membership in a tight-knit neighborhood, and, in the end, the cultivation of a house. Hannah even conceives of affection as a house, a “nice room with plenty of doorways,” full of everybody with whom she has shared love and friendship. As an previous lady, she spends her days recounting their names, which she calls “the names of her gratitude.” Dedicating a chapter to every one—her “Steadman” household of origin, “Virgil,” “the Feltners,” “Nathan,” “Burley,” “M. B. Coulter,” “Caleb,” “Margaret,” “the Branches,” and, lastly, “Virge”—she expresses shock, after which thanks, at what number of there are. “And so I’ve to say,” she provides after pondering what makes life complete, “that one other of the golden threads is gratitude.”
Contemplating Hannah’s many trials, it’s value asking: What makes her select gratitude for her life reasonably than resentment for her losses and eager for what may have been? Early within the novel, she credit her grandmother, “Grandmam,” with shaping her life. When Hannah was left with no mom on the age of 12, Grandmam stepped in, instructing her the virtues and abilities wanted to run a family and farm. Collectively they might rise earlier than daybreak for morning chores and keep up previous darkish ending home tasks and homework. Between duties, they might speak, swapping tales from the previous and hopes for the long run. Although Grandmam skilled her share of laborious instances, she reminisced “with affection however with out grief,” Hannah remembers. “She didn’t grieve over herself.”
Grandmam’s refusal to embrace bitterness and victimhood impressed Hannah, who repeatedly displays the braveness “to stay proper on” after heartbreaking loss, in contradistinction to trendy tendencies to nurse wounds and navel-gaze. Nor did her and Grandmam’s laborious work depart a lot time for preoccupation with what they lacked. Describing the non secular richness of her childhood, Hannah explains, “We had, you may say, every little thing however cash—Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had one another and our work, and never a lot time to consider what we didn’t have.” From Grandmam, Hannah realized of the “little happinesses” that come “from peculiar pleasures in peculiar issues.” As she places it a number of years later within the wake of the dying of her first husband, Virgil: “I started to belief the world, to not give me what I needed, for I noticed that it couldn’t be trusted to try this, however to present unexpected items and pleasures that I had not thought to need.”
With out sugar-coating or romanticizing her sorrows and hardships, she reveals that the love that carries her all through her life outshines each grief.
If Grandmam taught Hannah how you can acknowledge presents amid poverty, her life in Port William teaches her how you can look after these presents nicely. The agricultural neighborhood of Port William, which Hannah marries into, is marked above all by constancy and presence. Its “members,” as Hannah calls them, view the neighborhood, its farmlands, and its friendships, as presents to be cherished and by no means taken as a right. They keep there not as a result of they’re caught, however as a result of they’re grateful. “Members of Port William aren’t attempting to ‘get someplace,’” Hannah observes. “They suppose they’re someplace.”
They apply their gratitude not simply by constancy and stewardship of the presents they’ve been given, however by sharing them with others—giving labor freely, for instance, and responding to neighbors’ wants as they come up, with “no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up” between them. Hannah contrasts this financial system to employment by a company, which “makes itself free by forgetting you clear as a whistle if you end up not of any extra use.” Members of Port William are presents, not instruments to be upgraded when a brand new mannequin comes alongside. By turning into certainly one of them, Hannah learns what gratitude seems to be like as a lifestyle.
Fashionable Training’s Pitfalls
But, as Hannah raises her kids in a post-World Conflict II world, she watches the Port William lifestyle develop more and more countercultural, particularly as progressive axioms infect the pursuit of schooling. Like many American mother and father, Hannah and her husband, Nathan, are keen for his or her kids to attend faculty, making monetary sacrifices to afford tuition. However, as with many college students at this time, the outcomes are blended. For the foremost lesson the Coulter kids be taught from the college shouldn’t be the intrinsic value of data, however its instrumental worth. They be taught to worth their schooling by way of the status, standing, and affect it would obtain. As Hannah places it, trendy schooling’s “large concept” is that of “a greater place.”
The trajectory of Hannah and Nathan’s youngest son, Caleb, illustrates this concept nicely. Caleb’s dream “job,” from a younger age, was to be a farmer like his father. He spent his free time earlier than and after faculty farming, and he took each likelihood he may to evade schoolwork for farmwork. Therefore, it was no shock that, when he went to school as his mother and father urged him to, he studied agriculture—and did nicely. So nicely, actually, that his professors couldn’t bear to see him deplete his faculty schooling on one thing as easy and mundane as a household farm.
“Caleb, why do you have to be a farmer your self when you are able to do a lot for farmers?” they coaxed. “You could be a assist to your individuals.” Because of this, farm-loving Caleb turns into a researcher and faculty professor, incomes his PhD in agriculture and instructing “fewer and fewer college students who have been really going to farm.” He traded in his dream of farming to change into an “professional” on it, a “man of repute.”
Neither is this trade-off the required consequence of pursuing increased schooling. An enriching schooling may, in any case, train college students to hunt “a greater place the place you’re, since you need it to be higher and have been to highschool and realized to make it higher,” as Hannah admits. The progressive assumptions she discovers underlying her kids’s schooling, nonetheless, counsel that enchancment lies elsewhere. “To be able to transfer up,” she paraphrases, “you’ve got to maneuver on.”
The hazard of this lesson shouldn’t be merely that it leads away from Port William, however that it precludes the gratitude Port William embodies. Suspicious that one thing higher lies simply across the nook, trendy college students be taught to not cherish the presents they’ve obtained, however to endlessly seek for an elusive “higher.”
Hannah’s kids fall prey to this siren music of progress, they usually every find yourself in worse locations. Influenced partly by college values, they chase status and standing to various levels and discover divorce and loneliness as an alternative. However are their selections strictly a product of their increased schooling? Hannah’s self-reflections complicate the image. She pushed her kids to go to school, in any case, as a result of she “needed them to have a greater likelihood than [she] had.” Later, conversations along with her husband prompted her to rethink whether or not wishing for a “higher likelihood” for them inadvertently disparaged the “likelihood” she had.
Was I sorry that I had recognized my mother and father and Grandmam and Ora Finley and the Catletts and the Feltners, and that I had married Virgil and are available to stay in Port William, and that I had lived on after Virgil’s dying to marry Nathan and are available to our place to lift our household and stay among the many Coulters and the remainder of our membership?
Effectively, that was the possibility I had.
Hannah doesn’t deny the necessity for judging failures of the previous precisely. Poor selections—together with one’s personal—warrant correction. However to complain concerning the “likelihood” one obtained in life is akin to complaining a few present.
Thus, Hannah comes to understand the second pillar of training gratitude, which lies in phrases as a lot as in deeds. That’s, gratitude requires not simply cherishing and stewarding presents, however giving thanks for them. It requires storytelling. Questioning how she handed down tales of “the previous days,” Hannah wonders whether or not her tales implied their backwardness and inferiority far earlier than her kids may encounter progressive spin in faculty historical past courses.
“Suppose your tales, as an alternative of mourning and rejoicing over the previous, say that every little thing ought to have been completely different,” Hannah posits. “Suppose you encourage and even simply enable your kids to imagine that their mother and father must have been completely different individuals, with a greater likelihood, born in a greater place.” If tales informed on this method threat conveying ingratitude, they threat transmitting it, as nicely.
Tales that deliver the previous to life, however, move down recollections of the blessings which have formed our lives, and in doing so, they move down gratitude. Moderately than dismiss the previous as irrelevant or mistaken, tales informed “proper,” to cite Hannah, convey the true situation of man’s state, which is certainly one of indebtedness. They reveal that one’s life is a present, to not be discarded for one thing “higher.”
Hannah’s last story, the novel itself, embodies this artwork of storytelling. It’s, as she places it, how she “perfects” her thanks. With out sugar-coating or romanticizing her sorrows and hardships, she reveals that the love that carries her all through her life—the love that builds a house and neighborhood like Port William—outshines each grief. And the right response is thanksgiving. As Hannah places it, “You mustn’t want for one more life. You mustn’t need to be someone else. What you could do is that this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray with out ceasing. In each factor give thanks.’ I’m not all the way in which able to a lot, however these are the suitable directions.”
