It would be difficult to find a writer who more cleanly hits the nail on the head of the truth than Wendell Berry. His essay "Standing by Words" may be one of the best attacks against the excesses of the contemporary love for technological progress that I have ever seen. Berry explains that the disintegration of language and the disintegration of persons and communities go hand in hand. Precision in language forces a kind of responsibility to that which is external to us. Precision in language forces us to go beyond the fantasies inside our mind and into the realm of things.
I'm skipping through a lot here, but what interests me is that Berry illustrates clearly how people who dream about the future and how everything will be fixed by technology are not really loving other people. Love cannot be abstract, but must be for particular people and creatures. So love for the future is self love. Listen to the wisdom here:
“Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else. Love for the future is self-love—love for the present self, projected and magnified into the future, and it is an irremediable loneliness.”
Wendell Berry is one of this country's best essayists. Buy this book and read it all. You will not be sorry.
1 comment:
Glad to see SBW re-released. I read it many, many years ago and it helped shape me in ways that allowed me to survive many crises--grad school, church weirdness, teaching, loss of a parent. It's a very, very important book.
dw
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