A remarkable book that I'm about halfway through.
I thought I would highlight a section I just read.
"Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exception poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchange corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain."
1 comment:
I read it about 10 years back. I remember being struck by his ability (not unlike William Least Heat Moon and, I suppose) many great writers/thinkers, to expound and have extraordinary observations based on the most everyday occurrences. Tremendous book. I remember finding a lot of simple joy in a section where a local sheriff comes down to confront him about his illegal fishing hole.
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