How can we measure a life in words, especially a life that meant so much to us? The obvious and only answer is we can’t. Our best is to set down personal impressions and thoughts that might touch others who also experienced that life in their own ways. One of my last in person contacts with Danny Miller was when he introduced Kentucky writer Wendell Berry in Greaves Hall last month. Many of us who were there at that event could not help but be aware how appropriate and suitable it was for Danny to make that introduction, given Danny’s personal and scholarly commitment to the ideas that Berry espoused , about the sacredness of place, ecology, and community, and how those values were being overridden by the impersonal and technological thrust of the modern world.
So it was not surprising that a book I bought at that event, Wendell Berry’s Art Of the Commonplace, should resonate with passages that made me think of Danny, then and even more now after his dying. In my memorial to Danny, I would like to excerpt three passages from this book and indicate in my own subtitles how they relate, in my mind, to his life and how he touched me and perhaps others who knew him:
Taking His Path Through Our Lives
“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets, it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape… Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it… [Like Interstate 71} it bears no relation to the country it passes through. It was built, not according to the lay of the land, but according to a blueprint. Such homes and farmlands and woodlands as happened to be in its way are now buried under it.” (Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill”)
Danny, as administrator and friend, did not try to build roads.dismissive of our lives. He found and took pathways through our lives- a great number of them.
Do You Need A Hug?
“On January 3, 1994, my brother John had a severe heart attack… In the hospital [visiting him as family] what I will call the world of love meets the world of efficiency – the world, that is, of specialization, machinery, and abstract procedure. Or rather, I should say that these two worlds come together in the hospital but do not meet….But that professional people can cross back into the amateur world, I know from much evidence….The most moving, to me, happened in the waiting room during John’s surgery. Toward the end of our wait, two nurses came in. The operation, they said, had been a success. They explained what had been done. And then they said that that after the completion of the bypasses, the surgeon had found it necessary to insert a ‘balloon pump’ into the aorta to assist the heart. This possibility had never been mentioned, nobody was prepared for it, and Carol [my brother’s wife, who had been a nurse] was not prepared for it. The two young women attempted to reassure her, mainly by repeating things they already said. And then there was a long moment when they just looked at her….
And then one of the nurses said, “Do you need a hug?”
“Yes,” Carol said.
And the nurse gave her a hug.
Which brings us to a starting place.” (Wendell Berry, “Health is Membership”)
As Danny well knew.
Down to Earth
“I have been walking in the woods and have lain down on the ground to rest. It is the middle of October, and around me, all through the woods, the leaves are quietly sifting down. The newly fallen leaves make a dry, comfortable bed, and I lie easy, coming to rest within myself…
And now a leaf, spiraling down in wild flight, lands on my shirt at about the third button below the collar…The event, among all its ramifying cause and considerations, and finally its mysteries, begins to take on the magnitude of history. Portent begins to dwell in it.
And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into humus…Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves. For a time only, sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed interreaching of the treetops, the leaves falling- and then that too sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace.
When I move to go, I rise up out of the world.” (Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill”)
Bill Mckim
November 12, 2008
