A day in the park

Last weekend was a walk on the beach… this weekend was a day in the  park.

It was a pretty incredible day– the park was packed with New Yorkers playing frisbee, flying kites, throwing the baseball around. I went on a long early-morning bike ride, had a huge roommate breakfast, and then bathed in the sun, studied French, and laughed with the friends that had gathered on the Great Lawn in Central Park.

On an entirely unrelated note, I’ve been wanting to post this little ditty for a while:

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man.
I like the world of nature despite its mortal dangers. I like the domestic world of humans, so long as it pays its debts to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven.
My purpose is a language that can repay just thanks and honor for those gifts, a tongue set free from fashionable lies.

A knave with a degree is a knave.
A fool in a public office is not a “leader”
A rich thief is a thief.
And the ghost of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer, returns in the night to say again:
“Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore.”

The world is babbled to pieces after the divorce of things from their names.

Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace.

Health is not procured by sale of medication, or purity by the addition of poison.
Science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to merchandise; it is a whoredom of the mind, and so is the art that calls this “progress.”
So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”

I think the issues of “identity” mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.
I know a “fetus” is a human child. I loved my children from the time they were conceived, having loved their mother, who loved them from the time they were conceived and before. Who are we to say the world did not begin in love?
I would like to die in love as I was born, and as myself of life impoverished go into the love all flesh begins and ends in.

When I hear the stock market has fallen, I say, “Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!”
I think an economy should be based on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft, usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole, though mortal, ignorant, and small.
I approve of death, when it comes in time to the old. I don’t want to live on mortal terms forever, or survive an hour as a cooling stew of pieces of other people.
I don’t believe that life or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire the household of the human soul, and all the creatures are burning within it.

Nor do I believe “artistic genius” is the possession of any artist. No one has made the art by which one makes the works of art.
Each one who speaks speaks as a convocation.
We live as councils of ghosts.

And so I would like to be a true human being, dear reader – a choice not altogether possible now.

But this is what I’m for, the side I’m on.

And this is what you should expect of me, as I expect it of myself, though for realization we may wait a thousand or a million years.

- Wendell Berry, from Some Further Words