An Ultimate Value, Enduring and Alive

by Robert

As it was, [my father] not only kept me within the reach and the influence of my native and ancestral ground, he gave me every encouragement, up to and including insistence, to learn everything I could about it. He talked and contrived endlessly to the effect that I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of man’s attention and care. With what seems to me to have been, in the face of prevailing fashion and opinion, remarkable insight and foresight, he insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing — and saying again and again — that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education.

― Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound (1970)

The full text can be found here.