My philosophy paper was coming painfully ponderously. When eking out words began to feel like panning for gold in a desert, I set it aside in favor of some of Wendell Berry’s “An Entrance to the Woods.” Sometimes (often, for me) leisurely reading is the balm when writing becomes arduous.
“My mind is still keyed to seventy miles an hour.” Sing it, sir!
“And having come here so fast, it is still busy with the work I am usually doing. Having come here by the freeway, my mind is not so fully here as it would have been if I had come by the crookeder, slower state roads; it is incalculably farther away than it would have been if I had come all the way on foot, as my earliest predecessors came. When the Indians and the first white hunters entered this country they were altogether here as soon as they arrived, for they had seen and experienced fully everything between here and their starting place, and so the transition was gradual and articulate in their consciousness. Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds; and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt. The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over—and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything.” (Berry, 1971, par. 11)
I think that’s my trouble: I’ve been too long inhabiting the environment humanity designed and too little inside the one we were designed to inhabit. My mind has been absorbed with the things of the screen, never allowed to be brought to a stop, always in the presence of, well, what feels like everything.
The transitions that mark my days are not “gradual and articulate;” they are harsh and hurried. I swivel from internet tab to Word document to library book, from one project to the next, often moving mere inches at a time, but ranging my mind over topics as removed from one another as a paper on the ethical communication of scientific uncertainty to flight and rental car bookings to the week’s dinner recipes to endlessly emerging emails to put the rabbits’ famed fecundity to shame.
My mind is still keyed to the keyboard when I’m at the stove, to the paper when I’m at the kettle. Though I haven’t moved much—by foot or otherwise—the exercise is draining and the strain on the senses evident: of course they fail to take in what they were designed to. And what, precisely, am I missing? I couldn’t say, save that it’s surely in the ballpark of a very great deal…
“Our senses, after all, were developed to function at [troglodyte] speeds; and the transition from [language to written word to paper to computer to internet] in evolutionary time, has been [alarmingly] abrupt.”
Berry, W. (1971). “An entrance to the woods” from Recollected Essays, 1965-1980 by Wendell Berry.
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
