"Increasingly over the last maybe
forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people
lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and
animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and every
cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is
mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite
believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember
either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and
poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as
a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.
The world I
knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The
households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost
and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work."
From Andy Catlett, p 93
By Wendell Berry
