b'Too many are now expending themselves utterly in the service of political abstractions, and my guess is that this is because of a growing sense of guilt and a growing belief that this guilt can be expiated in political action. How can a man hope to promote peace in the world if he has not made it possible in his own life and his own household? 6What must have struck many as an idealistic preference to talk about the virtues of small farms and sense of place amidst anti-war protest and widespread civil unrest was and is for Berry a matter of essential grounding and pragmatism:I wish to speak no further except out of the few acres of hillside and woods and riverbank near Port Royal, Kentucky, that I hope to have made mine for life. I accept the meanings of that place, for the time I will be there, as my meanings, accepting also that my life and its effects belong ineradicably to that place. I am occupied there with a small orchard, vines and berry bushes, henyard and garden and pasturewith increasing the richness and the abundance and the meaningfulness of that part of the earth for my family and myself, and for those who will live there after us. This effort has given me many hours of intense plea-sure, both in itself and in the sense of what it means as a human possibility. It holds out to me in the most immediate way the hope of peace, the ideal of harmlessness, the redeeming chance that a man can live so as to enhance and enlarge the possibility of life in the world, rather than to diminish it.Im going to linger along these banks of the Kentucky River a bit longer, because, clearly, this thought experiment has a life of its own, and I want to respect and learn from it. Over the years Ive revisited this terrain many, many times, but that doesnt mean there isnt still a lot to learn. 6 These and the excerpts that follow in this section are from the essay Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience in Honor of Donald Pratt, by Wendell Berry (appearing in The Long-Legged House, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004). 14'