Soulfood

I always mean to make posts like this frequently and then seem not to get around to it. Of course, that is about the sum of how few posts I make in general. I’m always thinking of essays I want to write and very few of them ever get turned into a first draft, let alone published. Maybe someday.

Here are some quotes from authors I’ve been reading or listening to recently:

C.S. Lewis, On Stories
“If…[one] said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of an adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think [one] would have been right. If so, nothing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera.”

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the mark of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle lift or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.”

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire: the Essential Wendell Berry
From “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”

“And in our time, this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order ultimately to replace ourselves. The danger most to be feared in technological progress is the degradation and obsolescence of the body. Implicit in the technological revolution from the beginning has been a new version of an old dualism, one always destructive and now more destructive than ever. For many centuries there have been people who looked upon the body, as upon the natural world, as an encumbrance of the soul, and so have hated the body as they have hated the natural world and longed to be free of it. They have seen the body as intolerably imperfect by spiritual standards. More recently, since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind – the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines. And so they hate it, and long to be free of it. The body has limits that the machine does not have. Therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.

“It is odd that simply because of its ‘sexual freedom’ our time should be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our ‘sexual revolution’ is mostly an industrial phenomenon in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure, or a pleasure machine, with the aim of freeing natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this ‘freedom’ are immense and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex characteristically establishes its ‘freeness’ and ‘goodness’ by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of sexual partners, orgasms, and so on with inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex which will be a great deal abundant as soon as it can be done by robots.”

“All good human work remembers its history.”