Want of Imagination

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?
            from Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

Chapter 21 of Hannah Coulter, entitled ‘Okinawa,” contains what I think of as Wendell Berry’s answer to The Greatest Generation. I may be wrong about that. I’ve not read The Greatest Generation, so I know only the implications of hype, but I have watched my shell-shocked uncle stare blankly off into space. He was a medic – a stretcher-bearer – in the South Pacific. “Okinawa” is very kind to the medical corps in the South Pacific.

My uncle will be 90 in June. Lately he has taken to walking along the highway we call Taft in Owen County. He was hurt in a logging accident in his seventies and walks with a stick. I see him occasionally when I’m speeding along that highway built for cars before I was born, a sturdy old man leaning on a stout piece of rudely carved hickory. He gazes out over the hills. He just stands and stares.

Once, in my starstruck youth, I tried to give him a copy of PT 109 and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t have it as a gift.