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How can we be so superior to our forebears?
The truth will never be complete
in any mind or time. It will never
be reduced to an explanation.
What you have is only a sack of fragments
never to be filled: old bones, fossils,
pieces of writing, sprawls of junk.
You know yourself only poorly and in part,
the best and the worst maybe forgotten.
However you arrange the bits, authentic
and random, a fiction is what you'll have.
But go ahead. Gather your findings into
a plausible arrangement. Make a story.
Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness
shine out amongst the rubble.

-----Wendell Berry, from his unpublished 2006 "Sabbaths" series.