“This is my story, my giving of thanks.” So begins Wendell Berry’s 2004 novel Hannah Coulter, narrated by the titular character, a 79-year-old woman recounting her life’s story. It is a work of thanksgiving, and it is a work about thanksgiving—how it is practiced, how it is learned, and what happens when it gives way to restless longing for “a better place.”
As such, it raises questions pertinent to today’s holiday. Thanksgiving preparations typically revolve around practical to-do list items, from booking travel accommodations and coordinating family schedules to cooking and cleaning before guests arrive. Reading Hannah Coulter reminds us that a deeper preparation is called for. What kind of an education equips us to give thanks?
Modern Americans tend to think of education in terms of cognitive development—attained through classes, lectures, and assignments, and measured by grades, standardized tests, and degrees. Hannah’s story offers a different view, revealing the primacy of an education in virtue without which human flourishing is impossible.
Formal schooling can foster moral education, but it can also thwart it. Through reflections on her own formation, as well as that of her children, Hannah sheds light on the love, fidelity, and cultural transmission that constitute an education in gratitude. At the same time, her story cautions against the progressive ideas that have come to animate the modern pursuit of education, threatening the traditions of thanksgiving Americans hold dear.
Finding the Golden Thread
From a certain perspective, Hannah’s story might read like a litany of grievances, rather than reasons for gratitude. She suffers the death of her mother at a young age; mistreatment by a wicked stepmother; widowhood not once, but twice; and abandonment by her adult children, who all move away. Yet Hannah sees her grief not as the defining mark of her life but as a signpost of a deeper reality.
“What is the thread that holds it all together?” she asks amid the losses of World War II, wondering if grief is the only constant in life. She instead concludes that love is the “golden thread,” shining out even in the darkness of grief. Indeed, the aching emptiness of grief itself “signifies the joy that has been here, and the love.” And so Hannah’s story, though sometimes “fill[ed] to the brim with sorrow,” is a story of love.
It is the story of the beauty of marriage, adoption into a welcoming family of in-laws, membership in a tight-knit community, and, ultimately, the cultivation of a home. Hannah even conceives of love as a home, a “great room with a lot of doors,” filled with everyone with whom she has shared love and friendship. As an old woman, she spends her days recounting their names, which she calls “the names of her gratitude.” Dedicating a chapter to each one—her “Steadman” family of origin, “Virgil,” “the Feltners,” “Nathan,” “Burley,” “M. B. Coulter,” “Caleb,” “Margaret,” “the Branches,” and, finally, “Virge”—she expresses surprise, and then thanks, at how many there are. “And so I have to say,” she adds after pondering what makes life whole, “that another of the golden threads is gratitude.”
Considering Hannah’s many trials, it’s worth asking: What makes her choose gratitude for her life rather than resentment for her losses and longing for what could have been? Early in the novel, she credits her grandmother, “Grandmam,” with shaping her life. When Hannah was left without a mother at the age of 12, Grandmam stepped in, teaching her the virtues and skills needed to run a household and farm. Together they would rise before dawn for morning chores and stay up past dark finishing housework and homework. Between tasks, they would talk, swapping stories from the past and hopes for the future. Though Grandmam experienced her share of hard times, she reminisced “with affection but without grief,” Hannah recalls. “She didn’t grieve over herself.”
Grandmam’s refusal to embrace bitterness and victimhood impressed Hannah, who time and again exhibits the courage “to live right on” after heartbreaking loss, in contradistinction to modern tendencies to nurse wounds and navel-gaze. Nor did her and Grandmam’s hard work leave much time for preoccupation with what they lacked. Describing the spiritual richness of her childhood, Hannah explains, “We had, you could say, everything but money—Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had each other and our work, and not much time to think of what we didn’t have.” From Grandmam, Hannah learned of the “little happinesses” that come “from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things.” As she puts it a few years later in the wake of the death of her first husband, Virgil: “I began to trust the world, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”
Without sugar-coating or romanticizing her sorrows and hardships, she shows that the love that carries her throughout her life outshines every grief.
If Grandmam taught Hannah how to recognize gifts amid poverty, her life in Port William teaches her how to care for those gifts well. The rural community of Port William, which Hannah marries into, is marked above all by fidelity and presence. Its “members,” as Hannah calls them, view the community, its farmlands, and its friendships, as gifts to be cherished and never taken for granted. They stay there not because they are stuck, but because they are grateful. “Members of Port William aren’t trying to ‘get someplace,’” Hannah observes. “They think they are someplace.”
They practice their gratitude not just by fidelity and stewardship of the gifts they’ve been given, but by sharing them with others—giving labor freely, for example, and responding to neighbors’ needs as they arise, with “no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up” between them. Hannah contrasts this economy to employment by an organization, which “makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use.” Members of Port William are gifts, not tools to be upgraded when a new model comes along. By becoming one of them, Hannah learns what gratitude looks like as a way of life.
Modern Education’s Pitfalls
Yet, as Hannah raises her children in a post-World War II world, she watches the Port William way of life grow increasingly countercultural, especially as progressive axioms infect the pursuit of education. Like many American parents, Hannah and her husband, Nathan, are eager for their children to attend college, making financial sacrifices to afford tuition. But, as with many students today, the results are mixed. For the foremost lesson the Coulter children learn from the university is not the intrinsic worth of knowledge, but its instrumental value. They learn to value their education in terms of the prestige, status, and influence it might achieve. As Hannah puts it, modern education’s “big idea” is that of “a better place.”
The trajectory of Hannah and Nathan’s youngest son, Caleb, illustrates this idea well. Caleb’s dream “job,” from a young age, was to be a farmer like his father. He spent his free time before and after school farming, and he took every chance he could to evade schoolwork for farmwork. Hence, it was no surprise that, when he went to college as his parents urged him to, he studied agriculture—and did well. So well, in fact, that his professors couldn’t bear to see him use up his college education on something as simple and mundane as a family farm.
“Caleb, why should you be a farmer yourself when you can do so much for farmers?” they coaxed. “You can be a help to your people.” As a result, farm-loving Caleb becomes a researcher and college professor, earning his PhD in agriculture and teaching “fewer and fewer students who were actually going to farm.” He traded in his dream of farming to become an “expert” on it, a “man of reputation.”
Nor is this trade-off the necessary outcome of pursuing higher education. An enriching education could, after all, teach students to seek “a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better,” as Hannah admits. The progressive assumptions she discovers underlying her children’s education, however, suggest that improvement lies elsewhere. “In order to move up,” she paraphrases, “you have got to move on.”
The danger of this lesson is not simply that it leads away from Port William, but that it precludes the gratitude Port William embodies. Suspicious that something better lies just around the corner, modern students learn not to cherish the gifts they’ve got, but to endlessly search for an elusive “better.”
Hannah’s children fall prey to this siren song of progress, and they each end up in worse places. Influenced in part by university values, they chase prestige and status to varying degrees and find divorce and loneliness instead. But are their choices strictly a product of their higher education? Hannah’s self-reflections complicate the picture. She pushed her children to go to college, after all, because she “wanted them to have a better chance than [she] had.” Later, conversations with her husband prompted her to reconsider whether wishing for a “better chance” for them inadvertently disparaged the “chance” she had.
Was I sorry that I had known my parents and Grandmam and Ora Finley and the Catletts and the Feltners, and that I had married Virgil and come to live in Port William, and that I had lived on after Virgil’s death to marry Nathan and come to our place to raise our family and live among the Coulters and the rest of our membership?
Well, that was the chance I had.
Hannah doesn’t deny the need for judging failures of the past accurately. Poor choices—including one’s own—warrant correction. But to complain about the “chance” one got in life is akin to complaining about a gift.
Thus, Hannah comes to appreciate the second pillar of practicing gratitude, which lies in words as much as in deeds. That is, gratitude requires not just cherishing and stewarding gifts, but giving thanks for them. It requires storytelling. Questioning how she passed down stories of “the old days,” Hannah wonders whether her tales implied their backwardness and inferiority far before her children could encounter progressive spin in college history classes.
“Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different,” Hannah posits. “Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place.” If stories told in this way risk conveying ingratitude, they risk transmitting it, as well.
Stories that bring the past to life, on the other hand, pass down memories of the blessings that have shaped our lives, and in doing so, they pass down gratitude. Rather than dismiss the past as irrelevant or mistaken, stories told “right,” to quote Hannah, convey the true condition of man’s state, which is one of indebtedness. They reveal that one’s life is a gift, not to be discarded for something “better.”
Hannah’s final story, the novel itself, embodies this art of storytelling. It is, as she puts it, how she “perfects” her thanks. Without sugar-coating or romanticizing her sorrows and hardships, she shows that the love that carries her throughout her life—the love that builds a home and community like Port William—outshines every grief. And the proper response is thanksgiving. As Hannah puts it, “You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
