I envy what Wendell Berry and his fellow agrarian contemplatives find in the woods, and although I don’t share their sensibility, I enjoy reading some of them. E.B. White, when he left New York City for a farm in Maine just before the advent of World War II, wrote a number of wonderful essays anthologized in One Man’s Meat. Berry himself writes engagingly about agriculture, although I part company with him on some environmental issues. Walden, for the record, I loathe.
My problem, I think, is that I am soulless. I don’t look for meaning because I don’t believe life has any beyond that with which we endow it with our words and deeds. I think the plants and animals in the woods are interesting, but I don’t find majesty or mystery. My strategy for controlling anxiety is distraction, not contemplation, and sitting quietly with nothing to do doesn’t clear my head. How can your head be clear when the bathtub needs scrubbing? Are the property taxes due? What on earth am I going to make for dinner? Is that a deer tick?
via www.starvingofftheland.com