When I turned 40, I was like, huh. I accept myself more now. It was much more comforting.

It is time to be old To take in sail.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night. Order is only the possibility of rest.

I don't remember when I did not know Port William, the town and the neighborhood. My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life. That story has surprised me almost every day—but now, in the year 1986, so near the end, it seems not surprising at all but only a little strange, as if it all has happened to somebody I don't yet quite know. Certainly, all of it has happened to somebody younger.

The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians run. Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.

The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.

But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can't bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped.

I have, to fill my mind and occupy my hands, the daily rounds of my economy. I have food to harvest and preserve in the summer and fall, firewood to gather and saw up and split in the fall and winter, the garden to prepare and plant in the spring. I have clothes and bedclothes to wash, and myself to keep clean and presentable. I have the endless little jobs of housekeeping and repair... I have books to read, and much to sit and watch.

In the summer dusk there is always a pewee calling his name from a dead branch somewhere on the edge of an opening. The Carolina wren sings the whole year round. I hear the frogs and toads at night, starting with the peepers in early spring, and later the crickets and katydids. Something wild is always blooming, from twinleaf and bloodroot early in spring to beeweed in late fall, things of intricate, limitless beauty. Often I fear that I am not paying enough attention.

He would get up in the midst of the crowded shop, interrupting the conversation, and start outside to relieve himself. "All who can't swim, mount the highest bench," he would cry out, "for the great he-elephant will now make water!

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.