The Idea of Mules, or a Critique of the Interstate Highway System

Wendell Berry writes about going from mules to tractors and what it means in a typically elegant essay in Orion Magazine.

Mechanical farming makes it easy to think mechanically about the land and its creatures. It makes it easy to think mechanically even about oneself, and the tirelessness of tractors brought a new depth of weariness into human experience, at a cost to health and family life that has not been fully accounted.

I don't always agree with Berry's sometimes cranky world view, but the man writes so clearly and well that it makes you realize just what an affront to the English language most modern writing is.

Maybe in time to come we will rip up the interstate highway system and, like in some post-apoctalyptic novel, turn them into long, thin community gardens. Poets will ride around on mules and recite epics based on old newspaper clippings from the age of oil.

There is a park bench with a plaque on it that reads, "For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free". It's a quote from Wendell Berry, and the plaque is dedicated to the memory of my brother, who died two years ago this Christmas. We're put here to be free, not slaves of technology, not "inputs" or factors in an economic equation. I may never be a farmer (or a poet), but I wouldn't want to live in a world where they don't exist. Nor mules either.