COUNTRY CHRONICLE
Beston, Henry
Country Chronicle By HENRY BESTON Nobleboro, Maine AMONG the various things which vanish into the vast emptiness of Winter, the countryman counts the presence of water as a living and flowing...
...A culture which has forgotten this dignity and estate of our troubled kind is not only an evil thing, it is a high road of the fool...
...Only the small tinkle of the living spring, seemingly without companion in the earth, remains of all the sound of waters, the treble music mingling unchanged with the lonely crying of the wind...
...Politics are but the moods of a people...
...How pleasant it is to get home from such a trip, and find the house warm, sunlit, and at peace, the last of a great stick of wood still glowing in the kitchen stove...
...Yet such forms are worth only as much as the men who make and use them...
...with the integrity or corruption of men they stand or fall...
...Those?»f the past who found it came upon no visible rill but only upon a small depression in which water-loving grasses grew comfortably in the hottest Summers, surrounded by brown and thirsty hay...
...Digging down some 10 feet, they came upon a granite ledge, over whose mflddy top flowed from within a small but living stream...
...Standing beside the range, the Mrs...
...The spring is only a comfortable minute's walk north into the fields...
...he is a creature of the Divine Mystery, and if he has produced his devils, he has produced his saints as well...
...What of us as children of this green and ancient earth with the clouds overhead and the plough ready to the hand ? Only by holding to some faith in the human sp^it can we live...
...There are no rills flowing anywhere about, and what puddles may have come into being from some midday warmth are mere hollows and kettle-holes of solid ice...
...In the violence and tragedy of human history there is a beam of undying and exalted light...
...The earth and the fountains of earth are sealed in iron...
...ALL, I shall have to say, save one living voice—that of the oyerfjpwjng well-spring of the farm...
...The great pond is a pond no more, but a levee of deep snow traced by strange, wavering paths of the wind...
...meditatively warms her hands...
...What of ourselves as human beings...
...The waters of earth which began flowing in the cold northern spring, making each greater gully of the woods the bed of a small brook and turning regions of the fields to sodden mires—where are . they now in this zero temperature...
...One car radiator is covered over with quite a good patchwork quilt...
...Water thrown out at the barn freezes before the eyes...
...I know no other such living rill in the nearer countryside...
...What I would seek, what we must all somehow find, are the springs of life and reassurance...
...Country Chronicle By HENRY BESTON Nobleboro, Maine AMONG the various things which vanish into the vast emptiness of Winter, the countryman counts the presence of water as a living and flowing power of the earth...
...So radiant pure it comes, so much like a welling of light, that there are times—as indeed this morning— when the filled pail, nested in the snow, might- be empty as when I carried it from the door...
...It is the spring unfailing, and no matter how dark a sky it reflects, its waters are waters of life...
...I use a white enamel pail, and save time by lifting off the hatchway of the spring-house and taking the toater directly from the pit...
...A youngster home from Iceland walks behind, a shovel over the shoulder of his Navy pea-jacket, and bright red "protectors" on his ears...
...EVERY morning I go to it for a fresh pail of drinking water...
...I have never known the Winter rill to fail...
...So obsessed is our world with politics that in quarrels over political forms we are destroying man as a human being...
...Huge storms bury the outlet under their deeps and masses of snow, new snows and the alternate warmth and cold of day and night cover it with a pebbled roof of ice a foot thick, low temperatures beard the oak pipe with gigantic icicles, and still the water flows...
...On a morning bright, with a glassy wind and full of whirled-up dust of snow, the welcome snow plough comes in sight, everybody abeard the truck bundled up in heavy . clothes like Winter bears, the hardy, outdoor faces glowing with the cold...
...the neighbors have dropped in for a call...
...Let us try a little to forget man as a being who seems today but a part of human masses, and remember the ancient wisdom that man is "man, woman, and child...
...Where is their sound in this great silence of the cold...
...Whatever happens in this year to come, let us keep our faith in the human spirit...
...To town on a cold day, finding various cars frozen up and snorting steam like dragons, the smell of radiator . alcohol strong along the side walk...
...Some 16 years ago, I had the reservoir enlarged and walled about to make a roofed pit some 10 feet square, the overflow outlet opening towards the pond...
...Farm Diary After a great snow storm, three pairs of snowshoes stand in a drift outside a friend's kitchen door...
...If man himself is the measure of his living works, then it is men and women and the human spirit within them which is of first coneern...
...Months will pass before I hear again the familiar murmur from the rocky shore...
...Man in this or any sense is not something to be indiscriminately bombed, murdered, andv dissolved by fire...
...In what valleys of the everlasting hills shall we discern the light of their waters and in what timeless land hear th* music of their flowing...
...THE new year is at hand, and I leave to others the none too happy task of moralising on these times...
...I have my own obstinate notions of what has involved us in both a material and a spiritual disaster, but I shall not discuss them here...
...How cold it was on the slope...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 52
