Even though I don't agree fully with what Wendell Berry says, I thought the following few questions and answers were somehow relevant to me.

Fisher-Smith: Many people who would agree with you in principle don't have the benefit of what you were born into, this ancestral relationship with a place. They find themselves living far from where their ancestors are buried, in unfamiliar land that they didn't grow up with, and don't know much about. How would you advise them to begin deepening their relationship with place?

Berry: Well, I think that I would give the same advice as Gary Snyder. Stop somewhere! Because you can't recover what's lost. There's no going back to get it. You just have to start again, and I think what people have to experience--have to let themselves experience--is the knowledge and understanding and even happiness that come with long association with people and places and kinds of work.

Of course, along with those enrichments there are griefs and worries too. As you learn what's involved in a place, or in a personal relationship, or a kind of work, you come to understand the dangers, the shortcomings, the damages that already have been inflicted, and so on. And if you stay in a place and make connections, make relationships, you experience losses that are difficult to bear.

What we're really talking about is faith, the faith being that if you make a commitment, and hang on until death, there are rewards. The rewards come. Nobody has ever said that this was easy to do, but I think that everybody who has done it has done it out of this faith that there are rewards. My experience suggests very powerfully to me that there are rewards.

Fisher-Smith: The phrase you just used, "make a commitment and hang on until death," reminds me of marriage. Something like half of all American marriages will fail, and forty percent of all adults are single now. That's a larger proportion than any time in this century. Is there a relationship between the present failure rate in marriages and families, and the failure to form a sustainable human relationship with the land?

Berry: As I see it, there is. People pursue perfection, and I suppose that's a thing that humans have a duty to do, in a way. But there's a tendency now to misunderstand this obligation to pursue perfection as a right to be perfect, to have perfection given to you. And so people enter into their relationships with one another and with their places with the idea that they have a right to expect those places and those people and those connections to be perfect, and then when imperfection appears, as it inevitably does, they feel that they have a right to be offended, and they don't see the arrogance and the condescension in that.

It's not up to the other people and the places and the relationships to be perfect. It's up to every participant to make the relationship and the place and the other person as perfect as possible. We don't have a right to give up on our choices and our places and, indeed, our cultural inheritance because it's not perfect. We don't deserve that they should be perfect. We have an obligation to make them perfect, if we can.

Fisher-Smith: Is this expectation of perfection in one's marital partner and in one's land, a form of narcissism?

Berry: Well, you expect the thing you have to be a perfect replica of the thing you desire. I suppose there's some narcissism in that. It also is condescending and arrogant.

Fisher-Smith: ...and childlike, in a way?

Berry: Very childlike, and it results in childish disappointment and frustration. The other thing is much more difficult because to submit to the job of making perfect a relationship or place or another person means that you must submit to correction yourself. You must submit to the agony of being made perfect yourself, and that's terrifying and extremely difficult. It means you have to face failure over and over again--to realize that you never will really succeed, but this is the necessary work of the world.

Fisher-Smith: Which is?

Berry: To take what we've got and make it better.

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