Wendell Berry s Wild Spirit

Transcription

1 PDFaid.com #1 pdf solutions online Wendell Berry s Wild Spirit Mrs. Harrell s 8 th grade class (2012) read an article by Erik Reece (photographs by Guy Mendes) consisting of observations and comments by Mr. Berry while on a bird watching hike with some friends. The piece appeared in the Aug/Sept 2011 issue of Garden and Gun as part of the Southern Masters series. What follows are 22 key passages chosen and illustrated by these students that will, hopefully, offer the gist of the article Please read the complete article online: berrys wild spirit

2 if this is our day we might as well have as much fun as we can.

3 We pursue a scientific quest for conversation. As much as anything, we come to hear and to tell stories.

4 About his studio, The Long Legged House, he wrote, As frail, to shelter love s eternal work, Always unfinished, here at water s edge, The work of beauty, faith, and gratitude Eternally alive in time.

5 In tumultuous and uncertain times, it is worth being reminded that these fine things still lurk eternally beneath history s dark veneer, and that an artist may catch a glimpse of them and render them into a lyric poem, a short story, or an essay.

6 Having no destination, only this will to wander, we move slowly.

7 A new cause: Slow Communication Movement we embody this and it feels good more leisurely deliberate communication, and it isn t limited to 140 characters.

8 Wendell stood steadfastly for family and community, self sufficiency, localism, conservation, and above all, learning to get by decently within natural limits.

9 Progress doesn t move inexorably in one direction, toward future, and it doesn t always look like progress

10 Trying to pay attention to things most of us ignore or simply don t take the time in our daily comings and goings to see the natural world through a magnifying glass or a poem, is the first step toward trying to preserve it.

11 environment I don t use that word, Wendell replies. It s an abstraction. It separates the organism from its place I name an actual place. I say Harold Tipton's farm

12 But I never doubted that the world was more important than the literary world

13 perhaps my governing ambition was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here

14 To know a place intimately means to belong to it more fully, and to take responsibility for its preservation

15 There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places

16 The natural world is sacred not a resource to be desecrated by extractive industries that fuel our economy

17 We cannot survive the economists dream of infinite economic growth on finite planet

18 Wendell s jeremiads against industrial hooliganism are what philosopher Martin Heidegger called the role of poetry to praise the whole in the midst of the unholy.

19 Wendell seems to balance his justified sense of outrage at the industrial economy with the pleasure that he takes in the natural world he is fighting to preserve, and in the stories that perpetuate the human comedy.

20 That s the problem with modern science It isolates a problem and offers an isolated solution

21 This isn t wild [gesturing to the trees]. What s wild is what s out of control and we are the ones that are out of control. We are the ones creating the dead zone.

22 to found the society for the Preservation of Tangibility. The tangible that which has actual form and substance. In a culture of avatars, electronic friends, and financial products that have no basis in reality, such a fundamentally human society sounds attractive indeed anyone can join

23 A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life and if he can enact something of its possibility to imagine it is perhaps the most powerful moral force we possess because it maps a future that is worth finding.

24 It has been Wendell s life s work. Outside the cabin door, a Carolina wren starts to sing.