Taking Pause in the Soil

The Stem reached upward — into structure, mechanism, and consequence. The Soil reaches the other way: down, beneath the argument, into the ground it has been standing on the whole time.

Everything said so far has rested on a quiet assumption — that a human being is the kind of thing whose regulation, relationship, and coherence determine what a civilization can become. That assumption deserves to be examined directly, because if it is wrong, the argument collapses, and if it is right, it changes more than the argument. It changes how we see ourselves.

This is the slowest part of the book. It asks nothing to be accepted. It only asks that we look.