'like young thieves in a glowing orchard'

Rawlins mounted up. You ready? he said.

I been ready.

They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

--Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992)

A consolation tinged with melancholy

On out-of-the-way shores, local historians ply their craft. Their burden is giving form to little places in an era of massive forces and generalizations. Like folklorists or ethnographers, they strive to keep alive in memory ways of life and habits of mind that civilization no longer countenances. And their reward for doing so is carrying out the duty of their affection. Their passion for the meanings of small things forces them to deliberate not just on the fate of their beloved places but on all things human. Their faithfulness to home is a compass in a great and shifting sea. 

Although it forever moves between the ragged edge of contemporary change and the cutting blade of time, local history compensates its practitioners with the blessing of preserving and creating other lives, places, and times. Surely, to offer a consolation tinged with melancholy, there are less-worthy callings than giving fresh forms, however transitory they be, to the work and complex ways of human beings. 

Local history can also bless one with a passion and a mission. How can one measure the gift of being joined to a conversation one can't truly quit? How wonderful it is to be caught up with a hundred topics that need exploration and exposition!...The local historian's driving ambition is to record the manifold realities of the place one calls home.

--Joseph A. Amato, "Local History: A Way to Place and Home," Why Place Matters (2014).

The only two arguments

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell....A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

—Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report (1985)

So Few Rememberers

I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn't know I had ever thought. "Forty years" or "Fifty years" or "Sixty years," I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.

—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (2000)