Since retiring I’ve become a big fan of novels for the sidelong glimpse of the implicit meanings of life they provide. I read Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow last year and what follows is from my favorite passage. At the end, in the very last sentence, is the best description of a human soul I’ve ever read.

“.. it is hard to look at the river in its calm, just after daylight or just before dark, and believe that history has happened to it. The river, the river itself, leaves marks but bears none. It is only the water flowing in the path that other water has worn.

Or is that other water really “other”, or is it the same water always running, flowing always toward the gathering of all waters, and always rising and returning again, and again flowing? I knew this river first when I was a little boy, and I know it now when I am an old man once again living beside it … and almost seventy years! … and always when i have watched it I have been entranced and mystified. What is it? Is it the worn trough of itself that is a feature of the land and is marked on maps, or is it the water flowing? Or is it the land itself that over time is shaped by the flowing water, and it caught by no map?

The surface of the quieted river as I thought in those old days at Squire’s Landing, as I think now, is like a window looking into another world that is like this one except that it is quiet. Its quietness makes it seem perfect. The ripples are like the slats of a blind or a shutter through which we we see imperfectly what is perfect. Though that other world can be seen only momentarily, it looks everlasting. As the ripples become more agitated, the window darkens and the other world is hidden. As I did not know then but know now, the surface of the water is like a living soul, which is easy to disturb, is often disturbed, but, growing calm, shows what it was, is, and will be.”