This article looks at how Wendell Berry’s short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as ‘ordinary’ because of the way that they refuse a heroic mode of standing above the world and instead accept and live into the vulnerable connections that mark our materiality. I show also how this acceptance, and not any attempt to transcend the ordinary, is what opens these deaths up to the sacred, which I argue is a mark of belonging in love to the world and the love that moves the world. In the second section, I outline the relational role death plays in inaugurating and sustaining the gift-giving relational bonds that make up the life of affection in a place, such that there is a sense in which it is death that opens us up to love, even as death always marks an absence.

中文翻译：

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温德尔·贝瑞短篇小说中的善终

本文着眼于温德尔·贝瑞 (Wendell Berry) 描绘美好死亡的短篇小说如何对人类情感的化身纽带进行了重要探索。我认为，他们这样做是通过向我们指出具体化的爱的脆弱平凡。我首先将这些美好的死亡描述为“普通的”，因为他们拒绝以英雄式的方式站在世界之上，而是接受并生活在标志着我们物质性的脆弱联系中。我还展示了这种接受，而不是任何超越平凡的尝试，是如何将这些死亡向神圣敞开的，我认为这是对世界的爱和感动世界的爱的标志。在第二部分中，我概述了死亡在启动和维持构成一个地方的情感生活的送礼关系纽带中所起的关系作用，