Read Wendell Berry's Writer and Region yesterday. Largely an examination of the harmful tendency in American culture to uphold the unsituated, uprooted individual as the ideal, rather than the person who tends to the metaphorical soil in which their metaphorical roots are sunk, and who engages in the work of caring for and tending to those with whom they are actually, physically situated.
Berry's writing on community and his pointing at how modern day (one might say late-stage) capitalism erodes it always resonates for me. I appreciate his insistence on specificity, on resisting the urge, and encouraging us to resist the urge, to generalize and commoditize, particularly when it comes to land and people.
"People as things, that's where it starts." This quote of Terry Pratchett's, spoken in I Shall Wear Midnight by the character Granny Weatherwax regarding the nature of evil, often bubbles up in my mind when I read Berry's work.
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