“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 girl 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 approach to stressed eager for “a greater place.”
As such, it raises questions pertinent to in the present day’s vacation. Thanksgiving preparations sometimes revolve round sensible to-do record objects, from reserving journey lodging and coordinating household schedules to cooking and cleansing earlier than company arrive. Studying Hannah Coulter reminds us {that a} deeper preparation is named for. What sort of an training equips us to provide thanks?
Trendy People have a tendency to think about training by way of cognitive growth—attained by way of courses, lectures, and assignments, and measured by grades, standardized checks, and levels. Hannah’s story gives a unique view, revealing the primacy of an training in advantage with out which human flourishing is inconceivable.
Formal education can foster ethical training, however it may well additionally thwart it. By reflections on her personal formation, in addition to that of her kids, Hannah sheds mild on the love, constancy, and cultural transmission that represent an training in gratitude. On the identical time, her story cautions in opposition to the progressive concepts which have come to animate the fashionable pursuit of training, threatening the traditions of thanksgiving People maintain pricey.
Discovering the Golden Thread
From a sure perspective, Hannah’s story would possibly learn like a litany of grievances, relatively than causes for gratitude. She suffers the demise 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 Warfare II, questioning if grief is the one fixed in life. She as a substitute 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 fantastic thing about marriage, adoption right into a welcoming household of in-laws, membership in a tight-knit neighborhood, and, finally, the cultivation of a house. Hannah even conceives of affection as a house, a “nice room with a variety of doorways,” stuffed with everybody with whom she has shared love and friendship. As an previous girl, 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 price asking: What makes her select gratitude for her life relatively than resentment for her losses and eager for what might 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, educating 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 discuss, swapping tales from the previous and hopes for the long run. Although Grandmam skilled her share of exhausting occasions, 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 reside proper on” after heartbreaking loss, in contradistinction to trendy tendencies to nurse wounds and navel-gaze. Nor did her and Grandmam’s exhausting work go away a lot time for preoccupation with what they lacked. Describing the non secular richness of her childhood, Hannah explains, “We had, you can say, all the things however cash—Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had one another and our work, and never a lot time to think about 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 demise of her first husband, Virgil: “I started to belief the world, to not give me what I wished, for I noticed that it couldn’t be trusted to do this, however to provide 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 the right way to acknowledge presents amid poverty, her life in Port William teaches her the right way to look after these presents effectively. 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 without any consideration. 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 assume they are someplace.”
They follow 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 when you find yourself not of any extra use.” Members of Port William are presents, not instruments to be upgraded when a brand new mannequin comes alongside. By changing into certainly one of them, Hannah learns what gratitude appears like as a lifestyle.
Trendy Schooling’s Pitfalls
But, as Hannah raises her kids in a post-World Warfare II world, she watches the Port William lifestyle develop more and more countercultural, particularly as progressive axioms infect the pursuit of training. Like many American dad and mom, Hannah and her husband, Nathan, are keen for his or her kids to attend school, making monetary sacrifices to afford tuition. However, as with many college students in the present day, the outcomes are combined. For the foremost lesson the Coulter kids study from the college isn’t the intrinsic price of data, however its instrumental worth. They study to worth their training by way of the status, standing, and affect it would obtain. As Hannah places it, trendy training’s “massive thought” is that of “a greater place.”
The trajectory of Hannah and Nathan’s youngest son, Caleb, illustrates this concept effectively. 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 probability he might to evade schoolwork for farmwork. Therefore, it was no shock that, when he went to school as his dad and mom urged him to, he studied agriculture—and did effectively. So effectively, the truth is, that his professors couldn’t bear to see him deplete his school training on one thing as easy and mundane as a household farm.
“Caleb, why must you be a farmer your self when you are able to do a lot for farmers?” they coaxed. “You generally is a assist to your individuals.” Consequently, farm-loving Caleb turns into a researcher and school professor, incomes his PhD in agriculture and educating “fewer and fewer college students who have been really going to farm.” He traded in his dream of farming to grow to be an “skilled” on it, a “man of repute.”
Neither is this trade-off the required end result of pursuing greater training. An enriching training might, in spite of everything, train college students to hunt “a greater place the place you might be, 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 training, nevertheless, counsel that enchancment lies elsewhere. “As a way to transfer up,” she paraphrases, “you’ve got to maneuver on.”
The hazard of this lesson isn’t 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 study 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 a substitute. However are their selections strictly a product of their greater training? Hannah’s self-reflections complicate the image. She pushed her kids to go to school, in spite of everything, as a result of she “wished them to have a greater probability than [she] had.” Later, conversations together with her husband prompted her to rethink whether or not wishing for a “higher probability” for them inadvertently disparaged the “probability” she had.
Was I sorry that I had recognized my dad and mom and Grandmam and Ora Finley and the Catletts and the Feltners, and that I had married Virgil and are available to reside in Port William, and that I had lived on after Virgil’s demise to marry Nathan and are available to our place to lift our household and reside 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 in regards to the “probability” one obtained in life is akin to complaining a few reward.
Thus, Hannah comes to understand the second pillar of working towards 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 might encounter progressive spin in school historical past courses.
“Suppose your tales, as a substitute of mourning and rejoicing over the previous, say that all the things ought to have been completely different,” Hannah posits. “Suppose you encourage and even simply permit your kids to consider that their dad and mom must have been completely different individuals, with a greater probability, born in a greater place.” If tales advised on this means threat conveying ingratitude, they threat transmitting it, as effectively.
Tales that carry the previous to life, then again, cross down recollections of the blessings which have formed our lives, and in doing so, they cross down gratitude. Relatively than dismiss the previous as irrelevant or mistaken, tales advised “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 ultimate 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 wish to be any person else. What you could do is that this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray with out ceasing. In each factor give thanks.’ I’m not all the best way able to a lot, however these are the proper directions.”