January 2011
4 posts
Imagination in Place - Wendell Berry
Near the beginning of George Steiner’s Errata, he writes about his experience with a pictorial guide to coats of arms, and how it overwhelmed him with “a sense of the numberless specificity” and how he “grew possessed by an intuition of the particular, of diversities so numerous that no labor of classification and enumeration could exhaust them.” In this other essay...
“This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Food Rules: An Eater's Manual - Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, among other books. He also gave an engaging TED talk a while back, where he shared a story about one farmer’s practice that I found very eye-opening and gives me hope about the future of our food. He’s also, unsurprisingly, an admirer of Wendell Berry. In Food Rules, Mr. Pollan gives us a wonderfully simple guide for what...
What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth...
If I were to have any idols, Wendell Berry would be one of the few at the top of my list. I have collected his essays over the many years, and they are a regular source of personal re-centering for me. This past year produced two collections from Berry. This volume and Imagination in Place, which I intend to read in the next few months. The theme for What Matters? is the economy - or, in...