The Saunterer

Wendell Berry on our paramount task

    We must not be content merely to advocate the principles necessary to the ecological and economic health of rural America. We must take care also to understand that such a healing involves the enactment of those principles by millions of unique individual farmers upon millions of unique small places. This is the paramount task of local adaptation, a requirement imposed be nature upon every creature, but from we humans, who in fact know better, have to our great cost and increasing danger exempted ourselves.

    For a brief biography of Wendell Berry, click here.

    (Quoted from All Animals)

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s definition of the human soul

    Kurt Vonnegut wrote:
    I’ll tell you what the human soul is. It’s the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right.

    (Quoted from the March 29, 2020, issue of The New York Times Book Review, page 6)

    For a brief biography of Kurt Vonnegut click here.

John Burroughs: Thank goodness for dogs

    About dogs, John Burroughs wrote this in the July, 1904, issue of Atlantic Monthly:

You can ignore him, and he is not offended; you can reprove him, and he still loves you; you can hail him, and he bounds with joy; you can camp and tramp and ride with him, and his interest and curiosity and adventurous spirit give to the days and the nights the true holiday atmosphere. With him you are alone and not alone; you have both companionship and solitude. Who would have him more human or less canine? He divines your thought through his love, and feels your will in the glance of your eye. He is not a rational being, yet he is a very susceptible being, and touches us at so many points that we come to look upon him with a fraternal regard.

Jaron Lanier on how the internet may be a force of social destruction

To Jaron Lanier, the internet “ could turn out to be the evilest invention of all time.” . . . “If you control the person’s reality, you control the person.”. . . “Never has a medium been so potent for beauty and so vulnerable to creepiness.” . . . “It is scary and awful how out of touch Silicon Valley people have become.”

    (Quoted from Maureen Dowd’s interview of Jaron Lanier in the Arts section of The New York Times, November 9, 2017. )
For a brief biography of Jaron Lanier, click here. For images of or relating to Jaron Lanier, click here.