The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry

(In the Western tradition of individualism there is the assumption that art can grow out of a personal or a cultural disease, and triumph over it. I no longer believe that. It is related to the idea that a man can achieve personal immortality in a work of art, which I also no longer believe. Though I believe that the liveliest art is suffused with the energy of the creation, and in that sense participates in immortality, I do not believe that any one work of art is immortal any more than I believe that a grove of trees or a nation is immortal. A man cannot be immortal except by saving his soul, and he cannot save his soul except by freeing his body and mind from the destructive forces in his history. A work of art that grows out of a diseased culture has not only the limits of art but the limits of the disease-if it is not an affirmation of the disease, it is a reaction against it. The art of a man divided within himself and against his neighbors, no matter how sophisticated its techniques or how beautiful its forms and textures, will never have the communal power of the simplest tribal song.)

There is an inescapable tentativeness in writing of one's own formative experiences: as long as the memory of them stays alive they remain formative; the power of growth and change remains in them, and they never become quite predictable in their influence. If memory is in a way the ancestor of consciousness, it yet remains dynamic within consciousness. And so, though I can write about Nick and Aunt Georgie as two of the significant ancestors of my mind, I must also deal with their memory as a live resource, a power that will live and change in me as long as I live. To fictionalize them, as I did Aunt Georgie to some extent in A Place on Earth, would be to give them an imaginative stability at the cost of oversimplifying them. To attempt to tell the "truth" about them as they really were is to resign oneself to enacting a small fragment of an endless process. Their truth is inexhaustible both in their lives as they were, and in my life as I think they were.