Berry, Wendell. Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023 (First Counterpoint edition. California: Counterpoint, 2024),59.

“A garden is just a way of mapping the strengths and limitations of your personality onto the soil. It would be too much to bear if nature didn’t temper a gardener’s ambition or laziness with her own unsolicited abundance.”

Klinkenborg, Verlyn. The Rural Life. (1st Back Bay pbk. ed. Boston [Mass.]: Back Bay Books, 2004), 33

Finished Adam Bede

For me it seems it’s the same with love and happiness as with sorrow — the more we know of it the better can feel what other people’s lives are or might be, and so we shall only be more tender to ’em, and wishful to help ’em. The more knowledge a man has, the better he’ll do’s work; and feeling’s a sort o’ knowledge. (482)

The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food–it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on. (458)

From one of the ten thousand books in this room I’ve checked out about misinformation and disinformation. Will find the citation later but like this as a conversation starter for the first history unit.

Here’s President Obama’s full speech.

James Fallows Response

Finished this, vaguely weepy, in the 52nd Street branch today.

Start with this one:

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward, and the hand may be a little child’s.

Eliot, George. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. (Portland: Mint Editions, 2021), 127.

First passage:

Starting with those conversations so long ago with Aunt Sarah Jane, I have learned to understand the old structure of racism as a malevolent convention, the malevolence of which is hard to locate in the conscious intentions of most people. It was a circumstance that was mostly taken for granted. It was inexcusable, yet we had the formidable excuse of being used to it. It was an injustice both accommodated and varyingly obscured not only by daily custom, but also by the exigencies and preoccupations of daily life. We left the issue alone, not exactly by ignoring it, but by observing an elaborate etiquette that permitted us to ignore it. White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the the problem for us white people, as we had finally to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for a customary indifference to unstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents. But we were used to it. What is the hardest to get used to maybe, once you are aware, is the range of things humans are able to get used to. I was more used to this once than I am now. Berry, Wendell. Andy Catlett: Early Travels. ( Emeryville, CA: Counterpoint, 2006) 75-76.

Second passage:

Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.
The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.

Berry, Wendell. Andy Catlett: Early Travels. (Emeryville, CA: Counterpoint, 2006), 93.