For human life to continue on the hillside (or anywhere else) through successive generations requires good use, good work, all along.  For in any agricultural place that will waste and erode–and all will–bad work will not permit “muddling through”; sooner or later it ends human life.

For good work to last, to outlast the work of the individual….

We must have community.  The community is an order of memories preserved consciously in instructions, songs, and stories, and both consciously and unconsciously in ways.  A healthy culture holds preserving knowledge in place for a long time.

—excerpt Standing by Words by Wendell Berry

---

There has been much passionate discussion on whether, if, and how our liberal democracy will survive the bad work of the Trump administration.  The future is unforseeable, beyond prediction.  We will fall back upon the remnant of what culture remains as resource for our survival and rebuilding.  The story-telling, songs, informal gatherings must continue. They are our lifeline, literally a tether to life, holding healthy culture in place.

---

THE SECOND COMING

by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?