"when man and woman possess their home, two minds, | two hearts that work as one"

"'may the good gods give you all your heart desires: | husband, and house, and lasting harmony too. | No finer, greater gift in the world than that . . . | when man and woman possess their home, two minds, | two hearts that work as one.  Despair to their enemies, | a joy to all their friends.  Their own best claim to glory.'"

     Odysseus to Nausicaa; Odyssey 6, c. 200, trans. Fagles (New York:  Penguin, 1996), 174. 

"That distant land"

      Andy Catlett's "remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside of the matter of fact of this world's present age.  He stands now with his father [Wheeler] and his father's father [Marce], and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that yet is the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it."

     Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett:  the force of a story (Los Angeles & San Francisco, CA:  Counterpoint, 2025), 144 (The future, 14).  Concluding lines, p. 151 (The future, 15):

     As they have carried the story, the dead and the living have been carried by it through the breakages of broken times, circling generation by generation back to that distant land, which they have never reached except by trial and in spells, never yet placing two generations securely in succession, the land where more than a century ago Marce Catlett departed with cautious hope in the dark past midnight, came home broke, and in the dark before daylight the next morning went back to work.