Dolors's Reviews > Jayber Crow

Jayber Crow is an octogenarian barber who sits under the poplars that hedge in his cabin and stares at the reflections on the river water that is always running somewhere, with time floating in swirls of memories of a life fully lived and now suddenly gone, its light extinguished from within. And yet, this very same river erodes the hills and pastures that have crowned Jayber’s home since the beginning of times as if to remind him that everything changes so that the essential remains the same.

I know what you are thinking.
What can the chronicle of community life in rural Kentucky, the unfulfilled desires of a loner trying to make sense of his declining faith or the musings of a conservationist have to do with you, a modern reader? How can they add anything new? I am sure you have had your share of going over old times and that you are familiar with many authors that have addressed similar subjects.
I won’t lie to you, this book is about all that, but it is also much more.
In fact, this book is a lot of things. Not because Berry is ambitious in his vast scope, but because he remains faithful to his vision of the world.
This book is the beginning and the end, a moral voice and a confession, a ferocious criticism to technical progress or materialism that devaluates the human.
It is the definite love story that will make you weep as you’ve never done before, a hymn to friendship, a tribute to the land that breathes out the wisdom of past generations.
It is a spiritual journey towards the culmination of a life, insignificant for its achievements, but all-abiding for its ability to detect and spread beauty even after its fleeting time has ticked out.

It turns out that Jayber, our old barber, is a philosopher after all, and that his self-effacing first-person narration becomes an intimate meditation on the mysteries of existence and the retelling of his lifelong quest to overcome fear and anger and replace them with enduring love. He becomes a monk married to his ideals that takes the vote of chastity to balance out the unfairness that befalls on the wife he won’t ever have and transforms his barber shop into an unconventional church where the Coulters, the Penns, the Feltners, the Keiths and the Chantams congregate to have a haircut and to be listened to like nowhere else in town. Barbers are known to be good listeners and Jayber was born to be both.

Wendell Berry’s prose is a clear-sighted reflection of the reality his characters struggle against, sailing the turbulent waters of the quotidian. The reader gets to see them appear and recede in the dark hole of WWI and WWII, defeated by illness or consumed by their own delusions, but in spite of this constant flow of lives parading through the years, there is a strong sense of timelessness that is closely related to the physical space they inhabit.
It’s precisely in the perpetuity of the natural world, in the idea of a place that anchors aimless spirits where Jayber’s heartache finds a comforting quietude, a solace that quenches his chronic loneliness.
Heaven is right here.
Beneath the shade of double-trunked white oaks and the song of twittering birds. In silent conversation among good friends. In the dark soil that yields crops and swaying wheat. In that so much awaited smile that covers us with light. In the boat that goes with the tide to cross this river, where you will see Jayber wishing, waiting for you, sitting patiently on the other side.