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Showing posts with the label Wendell Berry

On Our Desire to Live Without Limits

Yesterday in my reading I stumbled across a link to an essay by Wendell Berry . I have to have my thinking cap on when I read anything non-fiction by him. As is usual with Berry, he mentions agriculture in the essay. So I think it belongs here, on a farming blog. The essay starts out by discussing our oil consumption, but quickly delves into the deeper problem of our desire to live without limits. We want to have what we want, when we want it, in the manner we want it. And here's a particularly good snippet about blooming where you're planted: If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard to make the most of one life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either. Or as one of my best teachers said of people in general: “They’ll never be worth a damn as long as they’ve got two choices.”