58/1001 - Berry, Croker, Wilbur

 May 30, 2025

Essay: "Life is a Miracle" by Wendell Berry

"In all of the thirty-seven years I have worked here, I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being here as I am. My success, as I well know, has been poor enough, and yet I am glad of the effort, for it has helped me to make, and to remember always, the distinction between reduction and the thing reduced. I know the usefulness of reductive language. To know that I am "a white male American human," that a red bird with black wings is "a scarlet tanager," that a tree with white bark is "a sycamore," that this is "a riparian plant community"--all that is helpful to a necessary kind of thought. But when I try to make my language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving.

"We are alive within mystery, by miracle. 'Life,' wrote Erwin Chargaff, 'is the continual intervention of the inexplicable.' We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. The constructions of language (which is to say the constructions of thought) are formed within experience, not the other way around. Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages. Perhaps we should wish that after the processes of reduction, scientists would return, not to the processes of synthesis and integration, but to the world of our creatureliness and affection, our joy and grief, that precedes and (so far) survives all of our processes."

https://www.communio-icr.com/files/berry27-1pdf.pdf

Short Story: The Priest's Dinner by T. Crofton Croker from a selection of Irish folk and fairy tales

Poem:

Two Voices in a Meadow

by Richard Wilbur

           "A Milkweed"

Anonymous as cherubs 

Over the crib of God,

White seeds are floating 

Out of my burst pod. 

What power had I 

Before l learned to yield? 

Shatter me, great wind: 

I shall possess the field.

           "A Stone"

As casual as cow-dung 

Under the crib of God, 

I lie where chance would have me, 

Up to the ears in sod. 

Why should I move? To move 

Befits a light desire. 

The sill of Heaven would founder, 

Did such as I aspire.