Behold! Life!

Is life a miracle to behold or a problem to be solved and something to be explained?

I have enjoyed reading Wendell Berry's book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. It is a passionate critique and response to E.O. Wilson's book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

[A brief and helpful summary is in Kirkus Reviews].

Berry is a poet, farmer, and former professor. He takes umbrage at Wilson's scientism and reductionism, which Berry considers to present an impoverished view of life, nature, and the university.

Berry has lived and worked on a farm for decades while writing. I cannot imagine doing this, as I am impractical. The passages below [page 45] gave me insight into what he is trying to achieve.

"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 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..."

“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 this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.”

Berry taught at a university for many years but eventually became disillusioned for reasons discussed in his essay, The Loss of the University.