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Imagination In Place (2010)

by Wendell Berry(Favorite Author)

3.98 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1582435626 (ISBN13: 9781582435626)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Counterpoint

review 1: This is a collection of essays, and I suppose it is inevitable that I would have a rather high opinion of it, since I agree with much of Wendell Berry's commentary on life, culture, society. But I am glad it took me so long to finish, having read the first essay a year ago and only picked it back up a few days ago. I think I needed to be in a certain place and time to truly understand much of what he wrote here and feel it so viscerally. I particularly recommend the following essays: The Uses of Adversity, on Shakespeare's As You Like It and Lear The Momentum of Clarity, on his studies with Wallace StegnerMy Friend Hayden, on friendship and the cycles of lifeExcerpts: "I would like to speak instead of the instructiveness that arises from a certain difference between our ow... moren present society and that earlier "folk society that hardly exists today." The difference is that certain matters that were merely personal or communal in the old society have now become ferociously political.""Well, I am a farmer, therefore a pragmatist: Half a crop beats none...But as I am a farmer, I am also a critic, and I know the difference between a bad result and a good one.""At that time I wanted only to be a writer; beyond that, I had little self-knowledge, and not an inkling of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to do it. I was living outside my life.""...though you may get a new life, you can't get a new past. You don't get to leave your story. If you leave your story, then how you left your story is your story, and you had better not forget it."
review 2: "With love, in friendship." p.110"As I seem to be confessing, I have grown or aged into difficulty in distinguishing between art and life. The reason may be that the difference is not always as neat or convincing as I used to think. When we make our art we are also making our lives, and I am sure that the reverse is equally true. When Jim wrote in one of his more recent poems that 'Light and dark became my sudden work,' so brilliantly using that adjective, he was talking about photography surely, but for me the line has a larger resonance. I hear it referring also to his long and arduous work of making his life by drawing it from darkness into light, and so making it whole." p.111 less

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