Thoughts

I recently read Wendell Berry's Andy Catlett: Early Travels, which is a short novel that documents a boy's week spent with his grandparents, narrated through the view of Andy as an old man. Andy talks about how, in 1943, he was living at the time of transistion from the old way of life to the new way, the transistion from a largely self-sufficient culture to one dependent on manufatured goods and all the things the age of 'cheap petroleum' provides.

One of the things that really struck me is that over the span of two generations, we have largely lost the skills and knowledge necessary to be self-sufficient. His comment in the book is that if we needed to go back to the older way of life, we would 'do so only uncomfortably and with much distress.'

It brought to mind the night I had watched a movie about farmers and couldn't get to sleep because I was wrestling with the fact that I didn't know the first thing about raising chickens or milk cows. Thanks to modern conveniences such as the local library and the internet, I now don't feel quite so ignorant, but I am still painfully aware that I'm not really used to working that hard.

I borrowed anoth Berry book of essays from my brother, and in the preface, he addreses the way in which this new age has affected the way we bring up our children. He writes (tongue in cheek):

The main thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.

I heard a news report this spring about how the sale of vegetable seeds tends to rise whenever the economy is supposedly in stress. People try to think of ways to cut costs, and decide that growing their own food is one of them. It makes sense, but it makes me wonder how many people my age have the skills and knowledge to just go out and plant a vegetable garden. How many of them, like me, have to consult the internet or a book in order to do the things that were naturally taught as a part of life a century ago?