Imagination in Place - Wendell Berry

Jan 22

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 collection from Wendell Berry from last year, he also addresses this topic in relation to place. He believes there is an enormous failure of imagination when it comes to its application to our country’s communities. Berry writes, “By ‘imagination’ I do not mean the ability to make things up or to make a realistic copy. I mean the ability to make real to oneself the life of one’s place or the life of one’s enemy - and therein, I believe, is implied imagination in the highest sense.”

By using such terms as “The South” or “the East side” or “uptown” we fail to use our imagination to realize that each place is unique and different. For a society that supposedly celebrates “individualism” we seem to have a tendency to gloss over individuality.

immaterial being

Imagination in Place - Wendell Berry