Roots
He said: “Conversation’s got to have some root in the past, or else you’ve got to explain every remark you make, an’ it wears a person out.” The conversation wells up out of memory, and in a sense is the community, the presence of its past and its hope speaking in the dumb abyss.
Wendell Berry (1980)
Berry, like many before and after him, muses on the importance of belonging. He probes various aspects to a community’s
cohesiveness,
More from Berry on the way communities grow with their members
a cohesiveness he sees as vital to its health: the health of community and the individual are reciprocal. Near the heart of traditional rural life is this reciprocity, for rootless individuals seem stranded, and deserted communities wither. The tide of movement of people away from the land (where
nature
Transcendentalism foreshadowed Berry’s writings
could endow them with all their non-material needs) to cities, means too many are left with nothing but work and
distraction.
Migration to cities is not new: both by masses, and in reverse by elites.
Although, like buddleia in the cities, some humans can find new and unexpected places to root, for so many of us, our roots have become dislocated. We establish families or circles of friends, but they in turn scatter. New families, or circles, lack the presence of the past. And we are all weaker for our rootlessness.
The Berry quote is from his What Are People For? on page 87 of the 2010 edition, published by Counterpoint, Berkeley.
These very rooted women were photographed at a large social gathering in rural Thanh Hóa, Vietnam.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 6th January 2024
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