A Continuous Harmony

This book is broad and leisurely and important. Something like the river itself on which Wendell Berry lives. It is full of wide and flowing thoughts and one thing leads to another in the manner that nature intended or used to. The language ranges from the grave and beautiful to the sharp and specific, depending on the need to express the vast variety of subjects he presents. The Nation The title of this book is taken from an account by Thomas F. Hornbein on his travels in the Himalayas. It seemed to me, Horenbein wrote, that here man lived in continuous harmony with the land, as much as briefly a part of it as all its other occupants. Wendell Berry's second collection of essays, A Continuous Harmony was first published in 1972, and includes the seminal Think Little, which was printed in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue and reprinted around the globe, and the splendid centerpiece, Discipline and Hope, an insightful and articulate essay making a case for what he calls a new middle.