On Being Limited.

Wendell Berry's in my blood and coming out in my words again. I've been thinking lately about his concept of economy (the classic definition of the word), that is, the well-being of a household and community. Anyone who has read extensively anything that he has written, know that he is very much in favor of community and local self-sufficiency and has a distrust of corporations.

This isn't because of something hippyish or some blind paranoia but is due to the reality of the abstract. When there are corporate headquarters far off and away from the local community, any decisions made regarding the impact of your community are purely abstract. To make it even smaller, any decision a local CEO makes regarding the well-being of a medium-sized company is abstract.

Berry often emphasizes a very unpopular word in today's vernacular: limit. Humans are limited. Our environment is limited. Our scope is limited. Our opportunities are limited. No, it is not true to say your child can be anything she or he wants. That child has a very limited scope of what's available to him or her. That's reality.

But our monetary economy and way of life, our sciences and social justices are all based on the idea of exponential growth, limitless continuance. But justice is limited. Money is limited. Anything that is attempted by humanity has a wall that cannot be passed in front of. In the beginning of his book, "Life is A Miracle," he states that we seem to hate that idea that some things by their very nature are a mystery, that there are things that exist in such a way that we cannot fully know them (he would probably argue that all things exist in such a way that we cannot fully know anything). We can certainly know about them in an intellectual sense. But man is not merely an intellectual being but something more and far greater.

I find this to be the reason why job hunting is so difficult. The disconnect in building up a company that has no direct correlation to a life outside of work other than a paycheck is troublesome. This is perhaps why corporate atmosphere is so suffocating to many. The conversations of many are so abstract, of golf and vacations and sports games but not of locality and commonality of livelihood and neighborhood. Berry's words are terrifyingly prophetic in the poem, "Mad Farmer Liberation Front:"

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

I write not as an outsider or rebel, but a fellow cog. My mind is also punched in a card and shut away to drift in front of YouTube and cable television and video games. To be alone and still is sometimes agonizing. To love my neighbor is worse.

But another voice mingles with Berry's. Many voices are speaking as one; they are the voices of The Dessert Fathers. "Our life and death is with our brother," says St. Anthony. "The monk must die to everything and judge no one, whatever," says St. Moses.

They fled the cities, the "Christianized" cities to delve deeper. They fled luxury and security and all that the world offered. And they pursued God and peace with all men and found both.

And it was a very, very difficult life. And it was a life that looked like madness to all (St. Anthony once said, "A time is coming when men will go mad and will pursue someone who is not saying, "He is not mad like us.").

There will always be voices crying out from the wilderness because we need them. We need the young boy to say that the king is naked while all else say he wears invisible clothes.

More so, at least for myself, we need to live these suggestions and let the application of such words be our critique of the world around us.