“Each atom belonging to me nearly as good belongs to you,” Walt Whitman wrote an epoch earlier than the Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger examined the quantum conditions of existence to ask that pressing, discomposing query: “What justifies you in obstinately discovering… the distinction between you and another person… when objectively what’s there may be the identical?”
It isn’t merely that we’re right here, manufactured from the identical matter, sharing the identical unbelievable planet; it’s that the sharing makes us what we’re, every of us a fractal of this immense and indivisible ecosystem of relationship, a golden strand in a tapestry whose solely that means is within the interweaving of its threads.
That regardless of this elemental interdependence we stay riven by battle and division is the nice paradox and the nice tragedy and nice alternative for redemption.
In his agrarian essay assortment The Art of the Commonplace (public library), poet, farmer, and thinker Wendell Berry dismantles the paradox to the constructing blocks of the tragedy and reconfigures them right into a cathedral of redemption.
In what’s nothing lower than an act of countercultural braveness and resistance, Berry indicts the Western capitalist mythos of “self-fulfillment” as the foundation of this synthetic and sometimes violent erasure of our interconnectedness and considers its elementary logical flaw:
The issue, in fact, is that we aren’t the authors of ourselves. That we aren’t is a non secular notion, however additionally it is a organic and a social one. Every of us has had many authors, and every of us is engaged, for higher or worse, in that very same authorship. Lets say that the human race is a good coauthorship during which we’re collaborating with God and nature within the making of ourselves and each other. From this there is no such thing as a escape. We might collaborate both effectively or poorly, or we might refuse to collaborate, however even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an affect and to have an effect on the standard of the product. That is solely a manner of claiming that by ourselves we’ve got no that means and no dignity; by ourselves we’re outdoors the human definition, outdoors our identification.
As an example how faulty this notion of a person separate from relationships is, Berry recounts visiting the experimental plots on the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and being pointed to an enormous Maximilian sunflower rising alone and aside from different crops. The person who had planted it proudly held it up for example of a plant that has “realized its full potential as a person.” Berry counters:
Clearly it had: It had grown very tall; it had put out many lengthy branches closely laden with blossoms — and the branches had damaged off, for that they had grown too lengthy and too heavy. The plant had certainly realized its full potential as a person, but it surely had failed as a Maximilian sunflower. Lets say that its full potential as a person was this failure. It had failed as a result of it had lived outdoors an vital a part of its definition, which consists of each its individuality and its group. Part of its correctly realizable potential lay in its group, not in itself.
In a sentiment springing from the identical defiant recognition that led Albert Camus to refuse the choice of right side and wrong side in conflict, Berry provides:
To make battle — the so-called “jungle legislation” — the idea of social or financial doctrine is extraordinarily harmful. Part of our definition is our widespread floor, and part of it’s sharing and mutually having fun with our widespread floor. Undoubtedly, additionally, since we’re people, part of our definition is a recurring contest over the widespread floor: Who shall describe its boundaries, occupy it, use it, or personal it? However such contests clearly could be carried too far, in order that they grow to be damaging each of the commonality of the widespread floor and of the bottom itself.
Echoing Schrödinger’s quantum-lensed koan-like perception that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” Berry writes:
The enterprise of humanity is undoubtedly survival on this complicated sense — a needed, troublesome, and fully fascinating job of labor. We’ve in us deeply planted directions — private, cultural, and pure — to outlive, and we don’t want a lot expertise to tell us that we can not survive alone. The smallest attainable “survival unit,” certainly, seems to be the universe… Inside it, all the things occurs in live performance; not a breath is drawn however by the grace of an inconceivable sequence of significant connections becoming a member of an inconceivable multiplicity of created issues in an inconceivable unity. However in fact it’s preposterous for a mere particular person human to espouse the universe — a risk that’s purely psychological, and productive of nothing however discuss. Alternatively, it could be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our types and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe… They offer the phrase “love” its solely likelihood to imply, for under they can provide it a historical past, a group, and a spot. Solely in such methods can love grow to be flesh and do its worldly work.
In consonance with the Nobel-winning poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore’s insistence that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world,” Berry provides:
It is just in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a value; it is just to the individuals who know us, love us, and rely upon us that we’re indispensable because the individuals we uniquely are… Separate from the relationships, there may be no one to be recognized.
Couple with Rachel Carson on marvel — that final gasp on the interrelations of issues — as the antidote to our human folly, then revisit Berry on the key to mirth under hardship, the peace of wild things, and how to be a poet and a complete human being.
