The week ends with news of further firings from the inner circle of palace courtiers. The Secretary of State was fired several days ago. The Deputy FBI Director Anthony McCabe was fired last night, by a twitter post. By way of contrast I offer these words of Wendell Berry, taken from the last essay, Poetry and Place, in his magisterial collection of essays, Standing by Words, published 1983

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One of the uses of poetry is to reveal and articulate and make and preserve the necessary connections between the domestic and the wild. It is one of the ways we may, with hope of return, get out of our minds (our own and other people’s) into the world of creatures, forms, and powers that we did not make.

Access to that world is sanity.

To be trapped in one’s own mind is insanity. To be trapped in another person’s mind –by political or technological tyranny—is imprisonment. (To want to live, like a frontiersman, where one

cannot see the smoke of one’s neighbor’s fire may be a kind of foolishness; it is not foolish to want to live beyond the radiation of one’s neighbor’s power plant.)

…An individual or a whole nation may be required to go into the wilderness and in that absence of home to learn or relearn something essential. That learning cleaves its way among differences. Devils and angels must be dealt with. Good and evil choices offer themselves in ways that cannot be escaped or ignored. The right path must be chosen among wrong paths, and there are sure penalties for error.

In the process, the mind renews its grasp on what is worthy and is stripped of its dross.