Fire and Knowledge

The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked Exit.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 171

To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.

–Wendell Berry, “Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience” in The Long-Legged House (1969), p. 85

I used to enjoy hurricanes. Most people do, though they won’t admit it, everybody does in fact, except a few sane people, for after all hurricanes are by any sane standard very unpleasant affairs. But what does that prove except that most people today are crazy?

–Walker Percy, Lancelot, pp. 163-164

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given to me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to motorists “a little room.” The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that is “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that the modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another mater. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), pp. 156-157

The political activist sacrifices himself to politics; though he has a cause, he has no life; he has become the driest of experts. And if he narrows and desiccates his life for the sake of the future of his ideals, what right has he to hope that the success of his ideals will bring a fuller life? Unsubstantiated in his own living, his motives grow hollow, puffed out with the blatant air of oratory.

–Wendell Berry, “Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience” in The Long-Legged House (1969), p. 83

What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions. Two sets of maniacs.

–Walker Percy, Lancelot, p. 152

Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our sense is concerned.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 142

[I]n my best moments I am not aware of the existence of the government. Though I respect and feel myself dignified by the principals of the Declaration and the Constitution, I do not remember a day when the thought of the government made me happy, and I never think of it without the wish that it might become wiser and truer and smaller than it is.

–Wendell Berry, “Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience” in The Long-Legged House (1969), p. 79