Fire and Knowledge

If we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people.

—Wendell Berry, “Conservation and Local Economy,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 204

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?…. Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), pp. 72-73

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

–Mark Twain

It makes more sense to write one big book—a novel or nonfiction narrative—than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all your possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses. Much of those years’ reading will feed the work…. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), p. 71

Teens try to change the world, one purchase at a time

“Food is something you need to stay alive,” says eighth-grader Emma Lewis. “Paying farmers well is really important because if we didn’t have any [unprocessed] food, we’d all be living on Twinkies.”

Eating morally, as some describe it, is becoming a priority for teenagers as well as adults in their early 20s. What began a decade ago as a concern on college campuses to shun clothing made in overseas sweatshops has given birth to a parallel phenomenon in the food and beverage industries. Here, youthful shoppers are leveraging their dollars in a bid to reduce pesticide usage, limit deforestation, and make sure farmers aren’t left with a pittance on payday.

Once again, college campuses are setting the pace. Students at 30 colleges have helped persuade administrators to make sure all cafeteria coffee comes with a “Fair Trade” label, which means bean pickers in Latin America and Africa were paid higher than the going rates. Their peers on another 300 campuses are pushing to follow suit, according to Students United for Fair Trade in Washington, D.C.

[The writer] is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), p. 68

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), p. 68

A diseased community will be suffering natural losses that become, in turn, human losses. A healthy community is sustainable; it is, within reasonable limits, self-sufficient and, within reasonable limits, self-determined—that is, free of tyranny.

—Wendell Berry, “Conservation and Local Economy,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 203