Love.......................

 

     But this was not the end of my love for Mattie Chatham.  After the figments of presumption and delusion had fallen away and I again saw myself as I was and my circumstances as they were, I loved her more, and more clearly, than I did before.  I became able to imagine her as she was and not as the subject of a dream.  In my thoughts of her, she stood apart from me.  I seemed to see her whole.  When I realized the futility and absurdity of my old self-begotten desire, that was when the arrow struck.  It entered my heart, and I could not pull it out.  The hopelessness of my love became the sign of its permanence.

     So it is that the life force, may take possession of a man—so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow