Noah Ryan, A Continuous Harmony

In class we discussed several passages from Wendell Berry's A Continuous Harmony. The passages that is most important to me is on page 3. I do not like the idea that "Earliest Man" saw the world first as object, and then saw something behind it. Rather, human beings developed religion and culture along with hands and eyes. The religious way of looking at the world is a mythology that explains how we got here and what we are. It is the human way of interacting with the world. I'm not going to get into a discussion of science as religion, but science does provide an explanation for us, and one that many believe very profoundly in. I am a firm believer in the physical world, but I'm not convinced that human beings can ever interact with it on any level but on the level of a biological being and specifically a human level. We can only see things of a certain size and in a certain range of light and velocity. Even with methods of extending our senses, we are built to interact and understand through the way we have always interacted and understood, the human way. This means that while serious philosophical discussion has its place, poetic language can be very helpful and meaning full in ways that more formal writing is not. It can discuss important idea and transmit personal, subjective thoughts on a level that is not possible in other mediums. If the way of interacting with the world shapes our thoughts, bodies, and brains than nature poetry has a very powerful place in our perception of the world.