By John Westbrook
This book has been moving around between various shelves at home and in my office for about a year. Saturday was a beautiful opportunity to sit out on the quad, settle into an blue Adirondack chair, and begin reading Wendell Berry. I started with the first essay, “A Native Hill,” which is a wonderful reflection on the promise and trauma of place, how it shapes us and we shape it. He wrote it in 1968 but it reads as if it could have been written yesterday. I particularly liked how he described the difference between the path, “the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place,” and the road, which aim to “translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort.” Reading Berry in the afternoon’s light was an invitation for my mind to meander through my own places and to discover something new in familiar mindscapes.
Title: The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
Hours read: Two hours