The Cultivation of Rachael Field: A Commonplace Book on the Arts of Husbandry - Softcover

Hensley, Mr. Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0986188034 ISBN 13: 9780986188039

Publisher: Little Fox Press, 2015

Synopsis

Part memoir, part meditation, part anthology, The Cultivation of Rachael Field brings together the threads of fifty-three years of living. Here, juxtaposed, are pith and poignancy, joys unspeakable, sorrows not easily borne. It is a small and disparate culling together by the standard of the modern biographer. But small legacies are accepted by true friends. And though the parts of this text differ as the apple from the orange, they are bound together by the notion that there is mystery in the mundane: "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, — / Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, / Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own" (Lowell). From the Preface: Holman's Handbook To Literature defines a commonplace book as a “classified collection of quotations or arguments prepared for reference purposes.” I realize that few people other than an English major would venture to offer such a clarification. But I do so, nevertheless, because this definition sums up fairly well what this book is about, and how it has come about, in that it has been my habit through the years to meditate on the problems I am facing, and the blessings I have received, and to record my thoughts, along with quotations from my reading, as a kind of self-talk, in order that I might better husband my affairs in the wide world. That husbandry proper is one of the great metaphors is herein presupposed. Thus, the agricultural headers in the preceding “Contents” introduce a variety of topics and genres beyond the field notes of a nurseryman: a love story; a collection of quotes on writing and rhetoric; meditations on the Christian world view; a collection of polemical essays and epistles, a moral essay on the transcription of a 1915 farm time book, and a selection of occasional poems. That each of these sections may be sampled as need or desire dictates is the standing invitation of a commonplace. But I would offer too that the threads of a story run little concealed through the chapters of this book. And since the principal reward in writing is, as E.B. White puts it, “breaking through the barriers that separate us from other minds, other hearts,” I would count it a blessing indeed if even one plodding soul who comes to this text will set his plow deep and not look back until the sods of it have been turned altogether to their loam. Tim Hensley August 2015

Edition details

• Publisher: Little Fox Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0986188034
• ISBN 13: 9780986188039
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 646