However, if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody’s business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns.
The corporate approach to agriculture or manufacturing or medicine or war increasingly undertakes to help at the risk of harm, sometimes of great harm. And once the risk of harm is appraised as “acceptable,” the result often is absurdity: We destroy a village in order to save it; we destroy freedom in order to save it; we destroy the world in order to live in it.
And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest. In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest. In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.
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.
Aunt Beulah could hear the dust moats collide in a sunbeam.
White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had 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 customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.
The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians “run”. Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.
He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.
The interaction, the interdependence, of life and death, which in nature is the source of an inexhaustible fecundity, is the basis of a set of analogies, to which agriculture and the rest of the human economy must conform in order to endure, and which is ultimately religious...
Grandpa’s farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa’s father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed money and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn’t have it at all.
I knew what he was doing. He was walking away from his thoughts but his thoughts were staying with him.
There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.
The word health belongs to a family of words, a listing of which will suggest how far the consideration of health must carry us: heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, holy.
The preserver of abundance is excellence.
Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?
It seemed to us that we’d never thought of him before as a man who would die. He never had thought of himself in that way. Until that year, although he’d cursed his weakness and his age, he’d either ignored the idea of his death or had refused to believe in it. He’d only thought of himself as living.
A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.
Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.
Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.
Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night. Order is only the possibility of rest.