The True Work of the Sciences and the Arts Is to Keep Us Moving Wendell Berry
"One can't write directly about the soul," Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. Few writers accept come up to write most information technology — and to it — more straight than the novelist, poet, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, who describes himself as "a farmer of sorts and an creative person of sorts." In his wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collection What Are People For? (public library), Drupe addresses with dandy elegance our neophilic tendencies and why innovation for the sake of novelty sells brusk the true value of creative work.
Novelty-fetishism, Berry suggests, is an act of vanity that serves neither the creator nor those created for:
Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Cosmos to novelty — the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.
Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that 1 cannot fulfill.
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
Berry paints pride and despair every bit ii sides of the same money, both equally culpable in poisoning artistic piece of work and pushing us toward loneliness rather than toward the shared belonging that truthful fine art fosters:
There is the bad work of pride. In that location is as well the bad work of despair — washed poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.
Despair is the too-picayune of responsibility, equally pride is the too-much.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
For despair at that place is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness tin forgive?
Good work finds the fashion betwixt pride and despair.
It graces with health. Information technology heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a souvenir.
Past it, we lose loneliness:
we squeeze the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come subsequently us;
we enter the niggling circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who motion also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Echoing Thoreau's ode to the woods and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips'due south assertion that cultivating a chapters for "fertile solitude" is essential for creative piece of work, Berry extols the ennobling effects of solitude, the kind gained just past surrendering to nature's gentle gift for quieting the listen:
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…
True solitude is plant in the wild places, where i is without human obligation.
One's inner voices become audible. 1 feels the allure of one'due south most intimate sources.
In event, i responds more clearly to other lives. The more than coherent one becomes within oneself as a beast, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
The return from such humanizing confinement, Berry cautions, can exist disorienting:
From the order of nature we return to the order — and the disorder — of humanity.
From the larger circle nosotros must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.
One enters the larger circle past willingness to be a creature, the smaller past choosing to be a human.
And having returned from the forest, nosotros remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.
In their nigh strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at residual.
In the circle of the man we are weary with striving, and are without balance.
Indeed, so deep is our pathology of human striving that fifty-fifty Thoreau, a century and a half ago, memorably despaired: "What business take I in the forest, if I am thinking of something out of the forest?" Merely the value of such recalibration of our connectedness in solitude, Drupe suggests, is that information technology reminds us of the artist'southward task, which is to connect u.s.a. to one another. He returns to the subject of despair and pride, which serve to separate and thus betray the task of fine art:
The field must retrieve the forest, the town must recollect the field, so that the bicycle of life volition plough, and the dying be met by the newborn.
[…]
Seeing the work that is to be done, who tin can assist wanting to be the one to do it?
[…]
Just information technology is pride that lies awake in the night with its want and its grief.
To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure.
It is despair that sees the work declining in one's own failure.
This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.
Just Berry's virtually urgent point has to do with the immense value of "thoroughly conscious ignorance" and of keeping alive the unanswerable questions that brand united states of america human being:
There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers.
The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
In ignorance is hope.
Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to.
They are waiting, as they ever have, beyond the edge of the light.
All of the essays in What Are People For? are imbued with precisely this kind of light-giving force. Complement it with Berry on what the poetic form teaches us most the secret of marriage, so revisit Sara Maitland on the fine art of solitude, one of the twelvemonth'due south all-time psychology and philosophy books.
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Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/12/17/wendell-berry-pride-despair-solitude/
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