Title : "My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor."
link : "My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor."
"My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor."
"They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations."
Says Wendell Berry, quoted in "Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age/Sixty years after renouncing modernity, the writer is still contemplating a better way forward" by Dorothy Wickenden in The New Yorker.
Berry's wife Tanya said "It’s too late for it to ruin your whole life." (He's 87.)
He was talking about his forthcoming book, "The Need to Be Whole," which some of his friends "urged him to abandon." It it, "he argues that the problem of race is inextricable from the violent abuse of our natural resources, and that 'white people’s part in slavery and all the other outcomes of race prejudice, so damaging to its victims,' has also been 'gravely damaging to white people.'"
Berry summons writers, from Homer to Twain, who extended “understanding and sympathy to enemies, sinners, and outcasts: sometimes to people who happen to be on the other side or the wrong side, sometimes to people who have done really terrible things.”
In this spirit, he offers an assessment of Robert E. Lee, whom he calls “one of the great tragic figures of our history.” He presents Lee as a white supremacist and a slaveholder, but also as a reluctant soldier who opposed secession and was forced to choose between conflicting loyalties: his country and his people.
“Lee said, ‘I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children,’ ” Berry writes. “For him, the words ‘birthplace’ and ‘home’ and even ‘children’ had a complexity and vibrance of meaning that at present most of us have lost.” Berry wants readers to hate Lee’s sins but love the sinner, or at least understand his motives. War, he suggests, begins in a failure of acceptance.
Having gotten into one of the worst fights of my entire life by taking the position that the subordination of women is also gravely damaging to men, I can imagine the storm that awaits Berry upon the publication of "The Need to Be Whole."
Somehow, an awful lot of us have a deep aching need to be half.
Thus articles "My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor."
You now read the article "My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor." with the link address https://usainnew.blogspot.com/2022/02/my-friends-i-think-were-afraid-now-that.html
0 Response to ""My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor.""
Post a Comment