Berry: wearily going back and forth

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them," Berry writes in the voice of title character Nathan Coulter. "That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you'd left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

Wendell Berry