Fire and Knowledge

I walk often through places unknown by any name or fact or event to people who live almost within calling distance of them, yet more worthy of their interest, I think, than the distant places to which they devote so much of their attention.

–Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 48

The novelist, then, has been encouraged to explore the boundless non-visual world, as the movie maker has taken over much of his former jurisdiction over the fantasy world of sight, sound, and action.

–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 129

If you want to leverage your reading comprehension, spend a little time with your books after you’ve read them. Savoring them, in a deliberate way, is the secret for getting far more out of your books and retaining the information for long periods.

–Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005), p. 38

In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible “The World’s Best Seller.” And it has come to be more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.

–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 122

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

–Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 41

As a former Floridian, air conditioning never seemed anything less than essential. It’s only when I moved to Minnesota that I first lived without it — and that was only for 6 months in an apartment, until we moved into our house with central air conditioning. Last summer (and likely, spring and fall) I ran the A/C every single day. This year I’m more ecologically conscious, and we only run it in the late afternoon if it gets too hot. We open the windows at night which usually cools off the house. We use fans to cool us off in the daytime.

“The deluded world of air conditioning” is a good reminder about the effects of air conditioning on our planet. Too often we use our electrical technologies without thinking about the consequences to ourselves and our neighbors. It’s a combination of ignorance and selfishness. We don’t completely understand the consequences, and if we do, we still demand A/C in our houses and stores — our planet and our health and our neighbors be damned. And if the air gets hotter because of it, well, we’ll just turn the thermostat lower.

An excerpt:

Air conditioning takes indoor heat and pushes it outdoors. To do this, it uses energy, which increases production of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere. From a cooling standpoint, the first transaction is a wash, and the second is a loss. We’re cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that’s still habitable.

All over the country, power consumption is breaking records, and air conditioning is a huge reason why. We use about one-sixth of our electricity to cool ourselves. That’s more than the total electricity consumption of India, a country whose population exceeds 1 billion. To get the electricity, we burn oil and coal. We also run air conditioners in our cars, which reduces urban fuel efficiency by up to four miles per gallon, at an annual cost of 7 billion gallons of gasoline….

Outdoor air used to cool at night, allowing us to recover from the day’s heat. Now it doesn’t. To fuel our own air conditioning, we’re destroying nature’s…. Instead of fixing the outdoors, we’re trying to escape it…. Outdoor space is too hard to control, so we’re replacing it with indoor space.

We [travel] more and more, not to see at all, but only to take pictures.

–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 117

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

by Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
than you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

From Given: New Poems © Shoemaker Hoard, Washington, D.C.