Berry on Locality, Wisdom, and Greed

Here is an interview with one of my personal heroes, Wendell Berry. Representative quote:

To make yourself a passive receptacle for information, or whatever anybody wants to pour into you, is a bad idea. To be informed used to be a meaningful experience; it meant “to be formed from within.” But information now is just a bunch of disconnected data or entertainment and, as such, may be worthless, perhaps harmful. As T.S. Eliot wrote a long time ago, information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.

For Eliot and many of his admirers, “the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living”…the life of season, mystery, and soil – a Gothic mind, against the cold harmony and regularity of rationality and organization – has much to recommend and much to teach. All things begin and end in mystery.