Just finished reading the book Recollected Essays 1965-1980 by Wendell Berry. It lost my interest at times and completely consumed my thoughts at other times. Here are a few of my favorite portions of the book.
“But the binoculars not only give access to knowledge of lives that are usually elusive and distant; they make possible a peculiar imaginative association with those lives. While opening and clarifying the remote, they block out the immediate. Where one is no longer apparent, it is as though one stood at the window of a darkened room, lifted into a world that cannot be reached except by flying. The treetops are no longer a ceiling, but a spacious airy zone full of perching places and nervously living lights and shadows. One sees not just the bird, but something of how it is to be the bird. One’s imagination begins to reach and explore into the sense of how it would be to be without barriers, to fly over the river, to perch at the frailest, most outward branchings of the trees.” –Page 51 The Long-Legged House
On moving his family back to his childhood home.
“I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident: now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure…In this awakening there has been a good deal of pain. When I lived in other places I looked on their evils with the curious eye of a traveler; I was not responsible for them; it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long, and I did not feel that I would stay. But here, now that I am both native and citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved in history. What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it: the lives of most of them diminished it, and limited its possibilities, and narrowed its future. And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave.” Pages 79-80 A Native Hill
“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.” –Page 86 A Native Hill
Enjoy Mom, this one is for you!
“But there is not only peacefulness, there is joy. And the joy, less deniable in its evidence than the peacefulness, is the confirmation of it. I sat one summer evening and watched a great blue heron make his descent from the top of the hill into the valley. He came down at a measured deliberate pace, stately as always, like a dignitary going down a stair. And then at a point I judged to be midway over the river, without at all varying his wingbeat he did a backward turn in the air, a loop-the-loop. It could only have been a gesture of pure exuberance, of joy-a speaking of his sense of the evening, the day’s fulfillment, his descent homeward. He made just the one slow turn, and then flew on out of sight in the direction of a slew farther down in the bottom. The movement was incredibly beautiful, at one exultant and stately, a benediction on the evening and on the river and on me. It seemed so perfectly to confirm the presence of a free nonhuman joy in the world-a joy I feel a great need to believe in-that I had the skeptic’s impulse to doubt that I had seen it. If I had, I thought it would be a sign of the presence of something heavenly in the earth. And then, one evening a year later, I saw it again.” –Page 112 A Native Hill
An Entrance to the Woods. It is too long to type up but I hope you all go out and find this essay asap. I read this for the first time from my Hammock under the bright, hot Swaziland sun. While reading this I felt back at home in the woods. I have missed a lot of people while I have been here but I think what I have missed most is simply being able to retreat to the woods by myself. Reading this essay brought me back there, if only for a few moments.
“No place is to be learned like a textbook or a course in school, and then turned away from forever on the assumption that one’s knowledge of it is complete. What is to be known about it is without limit, and it is endlessly changing. Knowing it is therefore like breathing: it can happen, it stays real, only on the condition that it continue to happen. As soon as it is recognized that a river- or, for that matter, a home-is not a place but a process, but not a fact but an event, there ought to come an immense relief: one can step into the same river twice, one can go home again. –page 248 The unforeseen Wilderness
“Where I am going I have never been before. And since I have no destination that I know, where I am going is always were I am. When I come to good resting places, I rest. I rest whether I am tired or not because the places are good. Each one is an arrival. I am where I have been going. At a narrow place in the stream I sit on one side and prop my feet on the other. For a while I content myself to be a bridge. The water of heaven and earth is flowing beneath me. While I rest a piece of the world’s work is continuing here without my help.”- Page 265 The Journey’s End
