Shifting Toward Wendell Berry
21 April 2015
I’ve been reading Wendell Berry’s wonderful collection of essays, Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food
. He engages questions of community and fertilizer and diversification and animal husbandry and solitude in a balance that I can only hope to achieve in my words . . . and my life, too.
I used to scoff at Berry, his unwillingness to own a computer, his insistence that he hand-write his manuscripts (which his wife then types.) But the longer I live and the more pervasive information is, the more I feel the weight of “being informed” and “involved” in every pressing question of life on earth, the more I get Berry’s choice. The more I shift that way, too.
I’m not going to be discarding my laptop or severing the Internet connection to the house. But I am slowly beginning to let go of the idea that to be uninformed is to be uncaring, to let something go by is to say that something is unimportant.
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