"Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions."

This is Robertson Davies's translation of a passage from St. Augustine's Confessions, which Davies borrows (in his novel The Rebel Angels) to describe both a good class and a good marriage. Really I think the motto might serve to describe, in the ideal, almost any benevolent communion: friendship, parenthood, playing music together. Even the marathon of moving two cords of wood from a pile in the driveway into a neat stack behind the shed might be considered the "mutual rendering of good services." For the job is now done: the stove-wood is covered; the kindling is collected in baskets and pails; the bark pile is raked against a fence corner; the odd-shaped chunks are heaped for summer fires on cool evenings; the neighbors have made their friendly comments. . . .