I find Wendell Berry, from whose essay I quoted yesterday, hard to read. Not because I disagree with him but because he’s so terribly, horribly earnest. Also, he seems to be entirely devoid of humor. No chicken boogers for this guy.
Nevertheless, if I steel myself, I can survive long enough to find bits and pieces that hold my attention for a long time after I’ve read them. Here are a few that I like:
… His work seems to keep ahead of me, like a man’s shadow when he walks eastward in the afternoon, and I have the comfort of believing that I will not exhaust the delight I take in it.
– from “A Homage to Dr. Williams” [poet, William Carlos Williams]… To be at home in the world, once one has come to the fateful modern consciousness of alternatives, requires a tremendous labor, an endurance of great fear.
– from “Notes from an Absence and a Return”… [diary note about driving back to Kentucky after spending a year teaching in California] The oppression of driving mile after mile under a veil of poison. Now it is only in the wild places that a man can sense the rarity of being a man. In the crowded places he is more and more closed in by the feeling that he is ordinary — and that he is, on the average, expendable.
– from “Notes from an Absence and a Return”… I haven’t been conscious before of how invariably when I have sensed or imagined the life of another creature, a tree or bird or an animal, I have had to begin by imagining my own absence — as though there was a necessary competition between my life and theirs. I looked upon my ability to imagine myself absent as a virtue. It seems to me now that it was an evasion. I began this morning to feel something truer — the beginning of the knowledge that the other creatures and I are here together.
For years the burden of my work has been the sense of being implicated, by inheritance and by various failures of consciousness of my own, in a phase of history that is malignant. Now what I am suddenly aware of is the possibility — or the hope? — of passing beyond guilt, which is clearly the source of my obsession with the absence metaphor.
– from “Notes from an Absence and a Return”… What is the First Amendment to him whose mouth is stuck to the tit of the “affluent society”?
– from “Discipline and Hope”… The end is preserved in the means; a desirable end may perish forever in the wrong means. Hope lives in the means, not end. Art does not survive in its revelations, or agriculture in its products, or craftsmanship in its artifacts, or civilization in its monuments, or faith in its relics.
– from “Discipline and Hope”
I don’t think I can agree that “[a]rt does not survive in its revelations”. I’m fairly certain that that is all that survives.
-Julie
Interesting, this shadow thing. He differentiates between walking East in the evening and West in the morning. There are two different feelings there. Of course, walking West could either be a metaphor for growing old (as in Lord of the Rings) or youth and adventure (as in Horace Greeley). Walking East is commonly associated with a journey to exotica (as in Marco Polo) or wisdom (all those Indian gurus.) I had never thought of casting a shadow in those journeys. On thinking about it, walking East in the evening just doesn’t seem to feel right. I don’t know, it just has an edge to it. Like purple mustard.
Comment by Dr. C. — November 14, 2009 @ 6:17 pm
If he walks East in the evening until he runs into a tall wall, the shadow will stand still and he can walk right up to it. Put some purple mustard all over it.
Comment by unrealnature — November 14, 2009 @ 8:04 pm