The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is at the top of the list of writers whom I deeply admire and whose writing consistently changes the way I think about things. Several of my favorite essays from this collection include "A Native Hill" and "Think Little." "Think Little" in particular echoes throughout my thoughts this year. If you've found your way to my half-baked reading notes looking for something to read that might have perspective-altering consequences, I could recommend nothing better than this collection of essays.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather t through it; its aspiration, as we see dearly in the example of our modem ways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography. (Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill”)