Tag: gift

Heroic works are meant to be (among other things) instructive and inspiring to ordinary people in ordinary life, and they are, grandly and deeply so. But there are two issues that they are prohibited by their nature from raising: the issue of lifelong devotion and perseverance in unheroic tasks, and the issue of good workmanship or “right livelihood.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: The Gift of Good Land p.300

The drama of ordinary or daily behavior also raises the issue of courage, but it raises at the same time the issue of skill; and, because ordinary behavior lasts so much longer than heroic action, it raises in a more complex and difficult way the issue of perseverance. It may, in some ways, be easier to be a Samson than to be a good husband or wife day after day for fifty years.

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: The Gift of Good Land p.300