‘
There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.’ —Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’
PROPHETIC WORDS OR AN AGE-OLD OBSERVATION of the way change, by necessity, is initiated, that is, breakdown serves as accelerant? In America at Risk: The Crisis of Hope, Trust, and Caring by Purdue sociologists Robert Perrucci and Carolyn Perrucci (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), systemic cracks are painfully dissected—with true and actionable enlightenment, hopefully, to follow. The Perruccis’ thesis:
“We believe that the decline of hope, trust, and caring is the unanticipated consequence of the major transformation over the last thirty years in the kind of goods and services produced in America, in the technology that is used in production, and in the people who are involved in the production process. We call the composite of these changes the new economy.”
Their take on our current collective cachexia, all part and parcel of the “new economy,” makes for compelling reading, and the slender book (including index and notes it’s a mere 160 pages) offers up an array of solutions that deserves further exploration, certainly before we move from Cohen’s “Anthem” to Gibbons’ Decline and Fall … (for instance, from Gibbons: “If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honor”—just plug in “terrorists” in place of “barbarian conquerers” and “America” in place of “Rome,” and wait for the cookie to crumble). Read More »
“I LIVE IN A PART OF THE COUNTRY that at one time a good farmer could take some pleasure in looking at,” Wendell Berry intones in the opening essay of his new collection, Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009); a little farther down the page he continues, “Now the country is not well farmed, and driving through it has become a depressing experience.” This somber tone-setting essay, “Nature as Measure,” was written 20 years ago. Poet-essayist-novelist Berry—now in his mid-70s and who has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for more than 40 years—has had plenty to rail against when it comes to Big Ag, the politics of indifference and our alienating post-industrial age; but he also has had plenty to celebrate in clear-eyed observations of humankind interacting with nature, the value of true hard work (diametrically opposed to the digitally and plutocratically enabled “work” of accumulating phantom wealth) and the rewarding simplicity of sharing, of family, of community.
An out-of-touch cranky neo-luddite screeching for a return to prelapsarian times? Hardly. Berry’s vision is that of a hardy-yet-hoary realist, tinged by both optimism and pessimism (ah, the foibles of humanity!), attempting to show us a path out of our befoulment, a steaming, festering swamp we teeter face-first ever closer toward. And Berry’s prose? Gracefully worn and weathered to a burnished beauty, like a glacier-cast erratic, transfigurative in its straightforward simplicity. Read More »
BEFORE TAKING A BITE of James William Gibson’s delicious new read, let me set the scene by revisiting a classic of enchantment that’s as fresh and evocative as ever, Thoreau’s Walden:
“We need the tonic of wilderness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”
I think this quote gets at the rather juicy heart of Gibson’s compelling and eminently readable Reenchanted World, published this spring by Metropolitan Books, a cautionary tale for the double aughts that judiciously includes a “Hope Renewed” coda. Read More »
There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.’ —Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’