Читать книгу The Countryman's Year - Ray Stannard Baker - Страница 3

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Many years ago I came to the hillside in the town of Amherst where I now live. I bought a few acres of land and built a house. I planted trees and cultivated my garden. I kept bees. I made good friends among my neighbors. Here I have known the best, I think, that comes to any man—times of sight that is also insight.

Although my life, as I said in an earlier book called Adventures in Contentment, has been “much occupied with other employment,” I have liked these experiences in the country better than anything else that ever I knew, and have written about them, day by day, in many small notebooks, thus enlarging my life by expressing it. I have also put down in my notes comments upon books I read, people I met and, above all, the things I meditated upon as I went about doing the quiet work of my land, my orchard and my bees. Sometimes I have thought: give me time enough here in this place and I will surely make a beautiful thing.

Some few of these notes I have now copied out, literally as written month by month through the countryman’s year. I have always liked best books that have been lived before being written. It is not experience alone that makes a man interesting to himself or to his neighbors—I once saw an ass looking at Rome—but the afterthoughts and transmutations of experience.

At first I thought I would call these chapters The Quiet Way, since they deal with so many quiet and simple things, and are in no way outwardly exciting, but I decided finally upon a title more exactly descriptive: The Countryman’s Year.

I give you here the best I have seen and heard in my brief passage through this arc of space, this instant of time. It is as far as I have gone at present: at present I have thought no further. I live here and am quiet.

David Grayson