History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the timeless nature of love and history, suggesting that everything is interconnected and that our experiences, even failures, form lasting bonds.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes the overflowing nature of history and love, suggesting that they transcend time and boundaries. It implies that while we may lose certain things in life, such losses do not erase our connections to them or to each other. Rather, they become part of a broader tapestry of existence where even regrets and longings serve to unite us. The idea that everything that can be shaken must be shaken speaks to the inevitability of change and the profound impact it has on our lives and relationships.
In practice
In a speech about resilience, I might say, 'As Wendell Berry reminds us, nothing is ever really lost, and our regrets forge our connections.'
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
If what the heart approves conforms to proper patterns, then even if one's desires are many, what harm would they be to good order?
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.
This is a lttle prayer dedicated to the separation of church and state. I guess if they are going to force those kids to pray in schools they might as well have a nice prayer like this: Our Father who art in heaven, and to the republic for which it stands, thy kingdom come, one nation indivisible as in heaven, give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail. Crown thy good into temptation but deliver us from the twilight's last gleaming. Amen and Awomen.
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