A friend gave me a copy of Jon Meacham's book entitled Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power. I am finding it a slow read as it is taking more and more self-encouragement to keep moving through it. I am some 350 pages into 514 pages of text. A friend pointed out that the book includes 215 pages of notes and bibliography--clear evidence that it is a scholarly piece. There are ever so frequent citations of letters and other works written by Jefferson and his contemporaries. I am beginning to think I could use a Dictionary and Grammar of Colonial English to more fully understand the text. It reminds me of reading Shakespeare, where the text would be annotated with definitions and translations into contemporary English.

I will return to T.J., but for now I am tackling Wendell Berry's The Art of the Common Place, which is a collection of his agrarian essays edited by Norman Wirbza.  The Big Question in much of the conservation literature is "Why wilderness?" Aldo Leopold, Sig Olson, and Edwin Dahlberg have all answered this question in their own way. Wendell Berry offers a perspective I have not seen any where else.

Here is an excerpt from Berry's essay entitled "A Native Hill."
"I come into a wild place. ... Sometimes I can no longer think in the house or in the garden or in the cleared fields. They bear too much resemblance to our failed human history—failed, because it has led to this human present that is such bitterness and a trial. And so I go to the woods. … I enter an order that does not exist outside, in human spaces. … I am less important than I thought, the human race is less important than I thought. I rejoice in that."

These words made me think of why it might be that I take comfort in sitting on the edge of really big water. There is water all the way to the horizon except where it is interrupted by heights of land on islands at varying distances. My field of vision excludes any and all visible evidence of human activity. My field of vision encompasses only "a wild place." In the hours of the early morning there are few if any sounds of human activity to my rear that encroach in and upon this scene and its impact on my senses. It is in this place that I realize that I am not all that important. The lake has done and will continue to do very well without me. Should the lake rise up on its own accord as it is wont to do, I have had and will continue to have clear evidence of my powerlessness. The lake is peaceful and caring, as well as violent and deadly. These descriptors in all their breadth and width and physical manifestations enjoy absolute moral impunity. Qualifiers, such as "good," "bad," and "no-never-mind," simply do not apply and can not be made to apply. It is in such a wild place that I learn who I am and have the occasion to rejoice modeling the example of Wendell Berry.