Standing by Words Quotes

“The mind that is not baffled
is not employed.
The impeded stream
is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“...the modern world abounds with heralds of "a better future" and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeats was "silly like us" or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress--and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the here of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how baldly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page - for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love, which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else. Love for the future is self-love - love for the present self, projected and magnified into the future, and it is an irremediable loneliness.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“I come, in conclusion, to the difference between "projecting" the future and making a promise. The "projecting" of "futurologists" uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one only to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else's future. If the promise is serious enough, one is brought to it by love, and in awe and fear. Fear, awe, and love bind us to no selfish aims, but to each other. And they enforce a speech more exact, more clarifying, and more binding than any speech that can be used to sell or advocate some "future." For when we promise in love and awe and fear there is a certain kind of mobility that we give up. We give up the romanticism of progress, that is always shifting its terms to fit its occasions. We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“Part of the nature of a form seems to be that it is communal - that it can be bequeathed and inherited, that it can be taught, not as an instance (a relic), but as a way still usable. Both its validity and its availability depend upon our common understanding that we humans are all fundamentally alike.

Forms are broken, usually, on the authority of the opposing principle that we are all fundamentally or essentially different. Each individual, each experience, each life is assumed to be unique - hence, each individual should be "free" to express or fulfill his or her unique self in a way appropriately unique.

Both the communal and the individual emphases can be carried to extremes, and the extremity of each is loneliness. One can be lonely in the totalitarian crowd, in which no difference is perceived or tolerated; and one can be lonely in the difference of uniqueness of individuality in which community is repudiated.

The whole range of possibilities can be exemplified within language itself. It is possible to speak a language so commonized by generality or jargon or slang that one's own mind and life virtually disappear into it. And it is possible to speak a language made so personal by contrivance, affectation, or slovenliness that one makes no sense. ("Poetry and Marriage")”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“Maturity sees that the past is not to be rejected, destroyed, or replaced, but rather that it is to be judged and corrected, that the work of judgment and correction is endless, and that it necessarily involves one's own past.

The industrial economy has made a general principle of the youthful antipathy to the past, and the modern world abounds with heralds of "a better future" and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeast was "silly like us" or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress - and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please. Cultural forms, it is held, should change apace to keep up with technology. Sexual discipline should be replaced by the chemicals, devices, and procedures of "birth control," and poetry must hasten to accept the influence of typewriter or computer.

It can be better argued that cultural forms ought to change by analogy with biological forms. I assume that they do change in that way, and by the same necessity to respond to changes of circumstance. It is necessary, nevertheless, to recognize a difference in kinds of cultural change: there is change by necessity, or adaptation; and there is contrived change, or novelty. The first is the work of species or communities or lineages of descent, occurring usually by slow increments over a long time. The second is the work of individual minds, and it happens, or is intended to happen, by fiat. Individual attempts to change cultural form - as to make a new kind of marriage or family or community - are nearly always shallow or foolish and are frequently totalitarian. The assumption that it can easily be otherwise comes from the faith in genius.

To adopt a communal form with the idea of chain or discarding it according to individual judgment is hopeless, the despair and death of meaning. To keep the form is an act of faith in possibility, not of the form, but of the life that is given to it; the form is a question addressed to life and time, which only life and time can answer.

Individual genius, then, goes astray when it proposes to do the work of community. We rightly follow its promptings, on the other hand, when it can point out correctly that we have gone astray - when forms have become rigid or empty, when we have forgot their use or their meaning. We then follow our genius or our geniuses back to reverence, to truth, or to nature. This alternation is one of the long rhythms.

But the faith in genius and the rebellions of genius, at the times when thee are necessary, should lead to the renewal of forms, not to their destruction.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“... marriage is the earthly form of love that gives love its place and work and provides for the good care of both bodies and souls. ... Marriage takes love out of the mind and places it responsibly in the world." ("Poetry and Marriage")”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words