On Isolation and Individualism

A few of Wendell's thoughts that have intrigued me, although I'm not sure how to illucidate them with life.  Many of his thoughts would seem most apt to those who are already intrinsically tied to them for they are intuitive as much as they are anything.  They are dug into actual dirt and their metaphors are not metaphors.  When Wendell says common ground he means just that.  For the rest then they at times seem like dirges.

"More and more," Mary Catharine Bateson wrote in With a Daughter’s Eye, "it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error."

...On the other hand, it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe. These ways are practical, proper, available to everybody, and they can provide for the safekeeping of the small acreages of the universe that have been entrusted to us. Moreover, they give the word "love" its only chance to mean, for only they can give it a history, a community, and a place. Only in such ways can love become flesh and do its worldly work. For example, a marriage without a place, a household, has nothing to show for itself. Without a history of some length, it does not know what it means. Without a community to exert a shaping pressure around it. It may explode because of the pressure inside it.

...Our choice may be between a small, human-sized meaning and a vast meaninglessness, or between the freedom of our virtues and the freedom of our vices. It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are. In our industrial society, in which people insist so fervently on their value and their freedom "as individuals," individuals are seen more and more as "units" by their governments, employers, and suppliers. They live, that is, under the rule of the interchangeability of parts: what one person can do, another person can do just as well or a newer person can do better. Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known; people become, as they say and feel, nobodies.

It is only in these trying circumstances that human love is given its chance to have meaning, for it is only in these circumstances that it can be born out in deeds through time -"even," to quote Shakespeare again, "to the edge of doom"- and thus prove itself true by fulfilling its true term.

Wendell Berry - Men and Women in Search of Common Ground