There is a hatch through which you can escape all that’s false about this world: all the status games and addictive screens, the news cycles and passing fads, the abstract systems exhausting us with their data on how we are good or bad, up or down, in or out.
The escape hatch isn’t anywhere particular—rather, it’s everywhere particular. It appears when you decide to start loving any given particular place, as a particular place. The realm you are escaping is the realm of abstraction—being a unit among units, deploying resources among resources, browsing options among options. The promised land you seek is the land to which you make a promise—to treat it and all that comes with it as the particular, wonderful, concrete things they actually are; to take up your role as a member of it.
Now it’s not exactly right to call this an escape hatch, because when you climb through it, you’re doing the opposite of escaping. The world we are trying to escape is a world designed around escapism—its flashy novelties are here to distract us from feeling our needs and facing our limits. When you climb through the hatch, you finally stop escaping—by sticking around somewhere, you now have the stability to be who you are, with all your grief and shame, quiet hopes and dogged vices. And in the humiliation of accepting that, you surrender the lie that the old world sold you—that you don’t need one another, that your lives aren’t bound up in each other’s.
It’s also not true that climbing through the hatch frees us from all that’s false about the world. People are still people, and you are still you. But they’re now people you can work with, at a scale you can work with. Free from screens and narratives that flatten and separate, you can “convocate” with the real neighbors around you—you can weave threads of your callings together into a shared calling, and then participate in the natural drama and joy of living out that vocation together.
In the world on the other side of the hatch, you’ll find everything from this world—but you will find it inside out. You’ll still care about what they’re doing in Washington, but you’ll get there by following your neighborhood creek upriver to investigate what they’re dumping in the headwaters. You won’t give up on big dreams, but you will understand that you trade sight for scale: that you lose your bearings when names become numbers, eyes become maps, and friendships become laws. You’ll still care about people around the world, but you’ll learn to love People by first loving a person. And you’ll laugh at the most beautiful joke I’ve ever read:
O when the world’s at peace
and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down
several times before that.
The man who opened the escape hatch for me and millions of others was Wendell Berry, the farmer prophet of Port Royal, Kentucky. For his life and work, I am immensely grateful.
Wow. This was just so beautifully written. I still come back to this!
That line about the promised land is so good.