Laudator Temporis Acti

Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods (Columbus: Two Dollar Radio, 2019), p. 7:

Now I have a home, and I like it. I like planting trees, building walls, collecting eggs from my hens. I like scything down the grass and pitchforking the hay. I like splitting logs, I like the sunset over the field, I like the silence and the birdsong. I like building up, slowly, a wildlife haven and a family haven. I would rather be here than anywhere else.

Id., p. 9:

Our house is small and a bit damp. It is not surrounded by breathtaking mountain scenery or sweeping white beaches, because we could never afford to live anywhere like that. It is quite an ordinary little place— modest compared to many new rural homes—which suits me somehow, because I feel I am quite an ordinary person, and I could never live in a big house. The land around it is gentle: crooked fields, still owned by small farmers, home to beef cows, a few sheep, the odd goat, and occasionally a strip of wheat or barley. The fields are divided by hedges of thorn, elder, oak, ash, sycamore, lime, under which streams run and past which old lanes wind. It is a pleasant, unspectacular, nooky, modest sort of landscape. It is my home, though I am still a stranger in it.

Id., p. 24:

I have come to hate idealists like the one I used to be, as a born-again non-smoker hates the smell of tobacco. Ideals are a pox on humanity: if you have ideals, you will go out into the world as a destroyer.