something worthy of notice..........

  

     Burley Coulter himself was one of the best perquisites of my office.  Burley was nineteen years older than I was, old enough to have been my father, and in fact he was the same age as my father would have been if he had lived.  He was the most interesting man I ever knew.  He was in his way an adventurer.  And something worthy of notice was always going on in his head.  I found him to be a surprising man, unpredictable, and at the same time always true to himself and recognizable in what he did.  I had lived in Port William several years before I realized that Burley was proud of me for being a reader of books; he was not himself a devoted reader, but he thought it was excellent that I should be.  It must have been 1940 or 1941 when he first came all the way into my upstairs room and saw my books in my little bookcase,

"Do you read in them?"

"Yes," I said.

He gave the shelves a long study, not reading the titles, apparently just assaying in his mind the number and weight of the books, their varying sizes and colors, the printing on their spines.  And then he nodded his approval and said, "Well, that's all right."

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow