I began to see how little of the beauty and the richness of the world is of human origin, and how superficial and crude and destructive — even self-destructive — is man's conception of himself as the owner of the land and the master of nature and the center of the universe.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, September 17, 2015
Man's Conception of Himself
Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), p. 52: