Quotable: Given Broken Blessed and Shared

Highlights from my personal best-of-Wendell-Berry collection--the literary version of a deserted island mix CD. Be challenged and and moved. Peace.

__________

I think

an economy should be based

on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft,

usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,

Though mortal, ignorant, and small.

. . . We

Who do not own ourselves, being free,

own by theft what belongs to God,

to the living world, and equally

to us all.

– WB, from “Some Further Words,” Given: Poems

__________

It is not necessary to have recourse to statistics to see that the human estate is declining with the estate of nature, and that the corruption of the body is the corruption of the soul . . . And it is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land. Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our “marginal” land because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.

– WB, “The Body and the Earth,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a nigger: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable materials and energies of the world and turned them into jimcrack “labor-saving devices.” We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making niggers of people: we have become each other’s niggers.

– WB, “The Unsettling of America,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

Having witnessed and abetted the dismemberment of the households, both human and natural, by which we have our being as creatures of God, as living souls, and having made light of the great feast and festival of Creation to which we were bidden as living souls, the modern church presumes to be able to save the soul as an eternal piece of private property. It presumes moreover to save the souls of people in other countries and religious traditions, who are often saner and more religious than we are.

– WB, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

– WB, “The Gift of Good Land,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

But won’t you be ashamed

To count the passing year

At its mere cost, your debt

Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

– WB, from “Sabbaths 1998:VI,” Given: Poems