Another Incredible book by Wendell. Read it
p. 38 “They go toward their desire with such violence of haste that they can never arrive. They go to the country to rest, only to reproduce there the noise, haste, confusion-and, surely, the frustration-of city traffic.”
p. 45 “We live in a fallen world by the dangerous presumption that we are unfallen. Only a nation that is conscious of its own guilt can change and renew itself. We are guilty of grave offenses against our fellow men and against the earth, but we have not admitted that we are.”
p, 58 “Christianity and democracy are by definition problematic. Since it may reasonably by doubted that either has been fully and fairly tried by any society, they may even be considered experimental. They have so far produced more questions than answers. But they are commonly presented to the young as solutions-the packages in which all the problems of the human condition are neatly and finally tied up.”
p. “In spite of our repetitious outrage at the violence in our streets and slums, we spend seventy per cent of our revenue on weapons-and so prove beyond doubt that we cannot imagine abetter solution than violence. In spite of our constant lip service to the cause of conservation, we continue to live by an economy of destruction and waste, based on extravagance and ostentation rater than need; we can see no reason to be saving, because we cannot imagine the future of the earth or the lives and the needs of those who will inherit the earth after us.”
p. 70 “Men cannot be taught and encouraged to kill by fostering those impulses of compassion and justice and reasonableness that make it possible to hope for peace... In fight a war, therefore, we are not preparing for peace, but preparing, inevitably, for the next war.”
p. 71 “The fault of the president's widely advertised interest in peace is the weary nationalistic convention that all the wrong is on the other side: we are peace-loving, they are warlike; we are good, they are bad. I am unmoved by this sort of talk simply because I am not able to believe it. And I am no better able to believe the counter-argument that all the wrong is on our side.”
p. 85 “To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.”
p. 87 “If one deplores the destructiveness and wastefulness of the economy, then one is under an obligation to live as far out on the margin of the economy as one is able: to be economically independent of exploitive industries, to learn to need less, to waste less, to make things last, to give up meaningless luxuries, to understand and resist the language of salesmen and public relations experts, to see through attractive packages, to refuse to purchase fashion or glamour or prestige.”
p. 89 “Over a number of years, by trial and error, they might invent a way of life that would be modest in its material means and necessities and yet rich in pleasures and meanings, kind to the land, intricately joined both to the human community and to the natural world-a life directly opposite to that which our institutions and corporations envision for us, but one which is more essential to the hope of peace than any international treaty.”
p. 168 “Men who drudge all their lives in order to retire happily are the victims of a cheap spiritual fashion invented for their enslavement.”
p. 178 “I am forever being crept up on and newly started by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or their own community in it.”
p. 193 “There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty: the spirit of the creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannon follow.”
p. 195 “I find his empty shotgun shells, his empty cans and bottles, his sandwich wrappings... his over-traveled bedsprings, his outcast refrigerator, and heaps of the imperishable refuse of this modern kitchen... I found a possum that he had shot dead and left lying, in celebrations of his manhood. He is the true American pioneer, perfectly at rest in his assumption that he is the first and the last whose inheritance and fate this place will ever be.”
p. 196 “We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to co-operate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
p. 199 “...for such religion as has been openly practice in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, heaven and earth. It has encourage people to believe that the world is of no importance, and that their only obligation in it is to submit to certain churchly formulas in order to get to heaven. And so the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere- to a pursuit of ‘salvation’ that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their own small lives beyond the life of the world. The heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions. This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artificial and ugly division in people’s lives, so that a man, while pursing heaven with the sublime appetite he thought of as his soul, could turn his heart against his neighbors and his hands against the world.”
p. 204 “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of the death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.”
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