Sunday, January 2, 2011

The miracles of endurance and ingenuity.

They have lost sight of the importance of process; they have forgotten that everything which is not natural is artificial and that artifice is painful and difficult, that they should be able to look at a loaf of bread and not realize the miracles of endurance and ingenuity that had to be performed before the wheat grew, and the mill ground, and the oven baked. This condition can be brought about by several causes: one is successful imperialism, where the conquering people has the loaf built for it from the wheat ear up by its conquered subjects; another is modern machine civilization, where a small but influential proportion of the population lives in towns in such artificial conditions that a load of bread comes to them in a cellophane wrapper with its origins as unvisualized as the begetting and birth of a friend’s baby.



REBECCA WEST.
BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.



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