Berries And Greed Quotes

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled. 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 cooperate 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.

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition.

It is no blasphemy to blame me when a love is lost. Only to surround a heart in hatred, prejudice, greed, or pride until I can no longer find it at all.

Life was far too fucking short to deny yourself things for the sake of someone else’s warped, singular idea of beauty.

He lay there in total submission.

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who are also preachers . . . Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, than it seemed to me that all the worst sins - hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust - came from the soul. But these preachers I'm talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

This much is clear to me: insofar as I am capable of feeling such pleasures as I believe Nick felt, I am strong; insofar as I am dependent on the pleasures made available by my salary and the things I own, I am weak. I feel much more secure in those pleasures for which I am dependent on the world, as Nick was for most of his, than in those for which I am dependent on the government or on a power company or on the manufacturers of appliances. And I am far from conceding anything to those who assume that the poor or anyone else can be improved by recourse to that carnival of waste and ostentation and greed known as “our high standard of living.” As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.

…For many years now, that way of living has been scorned, and over the last 40 or 50 years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent to some extent on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably – could even have improved it. Now, we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress. 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 ever 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.

How could anyone believe that a political system could provide all of the goods and services a people needed without cost? A daily gratification that would eliminate greed, selfishness, miserliness, and infidelity. A place where man could become noble, strong, and courageous. Crime, violence, and social ills would vanish. It’s absurd. The experiment called the Soviet Union only proved that none of that is possible.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

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 ever 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." -Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett Early Travels, p. 93

A better possibility is that the movement to preserve the environment will be seen to be, as I think it has to be, not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements, but the logical culmination of those movements. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots. [...] We would be foold to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know any certainty what was good for even us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world- to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity- our own capacity for life- that is stifled by our arrogant assumption: the creation itself is stifled. 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 we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for 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. After more than thirty years I have at last arrived at the candor necessary to stand on this part of the earth that is so full of my own history and so much damaged by it, and as: What is this place? What is in it? What is its nature? How should humans live in it? I have not found the answers, though I believe that in partial and fragmentary ways they have begun to come to me. But the questions are more important than their answers. In a final sense, they have no answers. They are part of the necessary enactment of humility of teaching man what his importance is, what his responsibility is, and what his place is, both on the earth and in the order of things… Wendell Berry

I felt like a grumpy old man most days, particularly when forced to be around other people, but it had actually been… kind of pleasant wandering around the city with her.

vaginismus

We know pretty well the makeup of the party of the global economy, but who are the members of the party of local community? They are people who take a generous and neighborly view of self-preservation; they do not believe that they can survive and flourish by the rule of dog eat dog; they do not believe that they can succeed by defeating or destroying or selling or using up everything but themselves. They doubt that good solutions can be produced by violence. They want to preserve the precious things of nature and of human culture and pass them on to their children. They want the world's fields and forests to be productive; they do not want them to be destroyed for the sake of production. They know you cannot be a democrat (small d ) or a conservationist and at the same time a proponent of the supranational corporate economy. They believe-they know from their experience-that the neighborhood, the local community, is the proper place and frame of reference for responsible work. 'They see that no commonwealth or community of interest can be defined by greed. They know that things connect-that farming, for example, is connected to nature, and food to farming, and health to food-and they want to preserve the connections. They know that a healthy local community cannot be replaced by a market or an entertainment industry or an information highway. They know that contrary to all the unmeaning and unmeant political talk about "job creation," work ought not to be merely a bone thrown to otherwise unemployed. They know that work ought to be necessary; it ought to be good, it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do it, and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for whom it is done.

It is altogether conceivable that we may go right along with this business of “business,” with our curious religious faith in technological progress, with our glorification of our own greed and violence always rationalized by our indignation at the greed and violence of others, until our land, our world, and ourselves are utterly destroyed.

I glanced around in bewilderment, tension seeping through me again. Oh my good god… Was this a sex cult?

But… higher beings? Really? We literally came from below them. And they were the ones who’d made all the good stuff. Pizza and TV and those little patches you could put on your pimples to make them practically vanish overnight.

And yet somehow, I had found myself being given a tour of a sex cult’s compound. A sex cult that worshipped my kind. That worshipped me. Get me the fuck out of here.

Oh god, I was going to have to seem at least half normal. I wouldn’t be able to shuffle around in nothing but my blanket onesie, standing in front of the open fridge in the wee hours, shovelling whatever I could find into my mouth, my brain hazy and loose from shade.

She does,” Kiti agreed, then smirked at me. “She’s pretty. Too pretty for you, buttface.” I scowled at her before pulling my hood over my head. “Yeah, she’s… I know she is. But we’re not—It’s just—Look, next time you visit, can you maybe not show her all my embarrassing baby photos, please?

God, it’s so big,” I rasped. Greid had been walking around with a third leg in his pants this entire time. Greid had been sitting beside me every night, eating and watching TV and getting high, with this beast just in his pants, just casually resting there.

Fuckety fuck. I was definitely completely in love with him.

I softened, briefly resting my head on his shoulder. “You’re sweet.” “Nngh,” he mumbled, fingers fiddling restlessly with the blanket over his lap. “How was your gross salad?” I laughed. “Really good. Want to try a bit?

Oh my god, was she trying to make me come? My dick throbbed uncontrollably from her words, and I let out a humiliatingly plaintive moan into her mouth. Call me a good boy again. Call me your little slut and tie me up and do whatever you want to me. My eyes popped open in alarm. Okay, maybe I was getting… a little too worked up.

Oh.” I sat back, but in the ensuing silence, it finally clicked. What he actually meant. What he was telling me. “Oh.” “I’m gonna go move into my workshop permanently now.” He moved to get up, still wearing the blanket like a cloak. “You can have the rest of the house. We’ll never speak again.

Oh fuck, this was it. The big dramatic scene in every human romcom, the heartfelt confession where they declared their undying love for each other. I wasn’t prepared! There was sweet and sour sauce on the front of my onesie, for fuck’s sake. I wasn’t wearing any pants!

Though the spring is late and cold, though uproar of greed and malice shudders in the sky, pond, stream, and treetop raise their ancient songs; the robin molds her mud nest with her breast; the air is bright with breath of bloom, wise loveliness that asks nothing of the season but to be.

The layers of crises and cruelty we face will not be solved with technological, political, or economic strategies alone. A deeper transformation of heart is necessary to welcome in a new story. Moving away from a worldview and a way of life that treats others as a “collection of objects” toward a new way of being human that participates honorably in a vast “communion of subjects” is what Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.”4 The Great Work is spiritual at the core. Gus Speth, an environmental attorney, ecologist, and climate advocate, has summarized the problem brilliantly: “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. . . . But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”5

But of my bad nights I made only one rhyme and it repeated itself to me time and again: Mortality And error, Partiality, And terror. It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing—the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed. - Mahatma Gandhi

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing—the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.