Field Observations

An Interview With Wendell Berry

The first necessity is to teach the young. If we teach the young what we already know, we would do outlandishly better than we’re doing. Knowledge is overrated, you know. There have been cultures that did far better than we do, knowing far less than we know. We need to see that knowledge is overrated, but also that knowledge is not at all the same thing as “information.” There’s a world of difference — Wes Jackson helped me to see this — between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

Stuck

The map I left for my wife merely depicted a mountain a hundred miles north of home, and I was twenty miles from the pavement. Soon the sun would be out of sight, and everyone knows what happens on a warm night in the desert when the sun goes down: the snakes come out. And the Mojave green rattler was indigenous to the area. While it was true I had a snakebite kit, it was also true that you can’t walk far once bitten and even bites that are nonlethal can result in permanent crippling.

The Joy Of Sales Resistance

This is a book about sales resistance. We live in a time when technologies and ideas (often the same thing) are adopted in response not to need but to advertising, salesmanship, and fashion. Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on “doing us good” according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication. These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dreams.

Garden Secrets

I believe gardening grows on you in your thirties partly because it usually takes that long to acquire land to care for, but mostly because it takes three decades to let the land care for you.

Mrs. Diest

She had lung cancer that had metastasized to her spine, liver, abdomen — everywhere except her brain. She was aware and alert and could feel it all. When I would come into the room, she’d ask me if I would help her die; she couldn’t go on this way. In those days, a patient would have to wait three hours between pain shots.

Krome

“Krome was set up on an abandoned missile base in the middle of a swamp. It’s big enough to hold about a thousand people, but they’ve got to have twice that many there now. All kinds of human rights violations. Not enough toilets, not enough water. These people haven’t done anything, but they’re being treated worse than convicted criminals. They even put hormones in the food to keep the men from rioting. It’s a concentration camp. You’ll see,” he promises me.

The Worlds Are Unstable By Nature

It snowed three nights in a row, the first heavy snowfall in Livorno in more than twenty years. The Red Brigade, angered by US. involvement in Vietnam, were busy that month spray painting US GO HOME in jagged red letters all over the American-owned cars in town.

Tea For Two

Since Karen left me, my evenings are quiet and predictable. No longer does she greet me the moment I open the front door with her wiry silence, unnerving as eye contact with a tiger pacing its cage.

Who Forgets My Name

Mother who falls / past me, who wants / what I cannot give her, / the peace I never found. / I never stopped looking / for you. In every woman. / In every day that sooner / or later let me down.

On The F Train

Rising out of Brooklyn / the Statue of Liberty