Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder letters reviewed
22 November 2014
Reaching out from their individual perspectives, Berry and Snyder consider the world from each other’s viewpoint with startling vulnerability. Revealed here is a brand of curiosity that can seem all but absent from modern social discourse, given our tedious devotion to the over-specialization of opinions, to a dull intellectual territorialism. Indeed, having read a 1977 interview with Snyder in the East West Journal, Berry notes that Snyder’s words formed a powerful suggestion that “thought might proceed — instead of by argument, dialectic — by people speaking for, clarifying, confirming one another’s experience.”
Moreover, throughout the correspondence in this collection, from 1973 to 2013, the friends seem to keep each other in a delicious state of flux, their vitality growing by virtue of their willingness to put as much priority on questions as answers.
Read more at L.A. Review of Books
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