Status Updates From The Unsettling of America: ...

I don't know how Wendell Berry would feel about me listening to this in audiobook form on a smartphone while I hurtle all over the state in a car, but I will have to live with his hypothetical disappointment...

It is a rule that whatever is divided must compete. We have been wrong to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best. Divided, body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with one another. And none of these competitions is ever resolved in the triumph of one competitor, but only in the exhaustion of both.

We must learn again to think of our energy, not as something to be saved, but as something to be used and to be enjoyed in use. We must understand that our strength is strength of body and that this strength cannot thrive except in useful, decent, satisfying work. There is no such thing as a reservoir of bodily energy. By saving it —as our ideals of labor-saving and luxury bid us to do — we simply waste it.