Think Little: Essays (Counterpoints Series)

by Wendell Berry

there was the belief, long honored among American intellectuals and artists and writers, that a place such as I came from could be returned to only at the price of intellectual death;

there was the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness

places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well

I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life.

now I began to see the real abundance and richness of it.

every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave.

I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place.

‘They knew but little,’

a highly complex sense of his dependence on the earth.

when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly

an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy.

The Indians and the peasants were people who belonged deeply and intricately to their places. Their ways of life had evolved slowly in accordance with their knowledge of their land, of its needs, of their own relation of dependence and responsibility to it.

Having left Europe far behind, they had not yet in any meaningful sense arrived in America, not yet having devoted themselves to any part of it in a way that would produce the intricate knowledge of it necessary to live in it without destroying it.

We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America.

we still know but little.

It must be noticed,

It represents the ultimate in engineering sophistication, but the crudest possible valuation of life in this world.

bluebells.

If I were given all the learning and all the methods of my race I could not make one of them, or even imagine one.

It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.

SOMETIMES I CAN no longer think in the house or in the garden or in the cleared fields.

And so I go to the woods.

I am less important than I thought,

the human race is less important than I thought.

I rejoice i...

I will live, suffer and rejoice, and die in my own time.

I wish to be as peaceable as my land, which does no violence, though it has been the scene of violence and has had violence done to it.

can I humble myself before a mere piece of the earth and speak of myself as its fragment?

the topsoil.

Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.

One has come into the presence of mystery.

groves of great beech trees.

we can do without it as soon as we have completed its metamorphosis into cash,

There is an ominous – perhaps a fatal – presumptuousness in living in a place by the imposition on it of one’s ideas and wishes.

There could be a consciousness that would establish itself on a place by understanding its nature and learning what is potential in

rains. We haven’t yet, in any meaningful sense, arrived in these places that we declare we own.

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch.

reenter the woods.

encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence.

recover the sense of the world’...

ability to thrive wit...

his inferiori...

dependence...

Perhaps...

he will grow...

learn from it wha...

then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain.

he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

I have turned aside from much that I knew, and have given up much that went before.

I can see the dark.