In every step you take today, in every rest you take, beneath your feet, beneath your body, the soil …
Berry, Wendell, The Unsettling of America, 1977
It is the nature of the soil to be highly complex and variable, to conform very inexactly to human conclusions and rules. It is itself damaged by the imposition of alien patterns. Out of the random grammar and lexicon of possibilities – geological, topographical. climatological, biological – the soil of any one place makes its own and peculiar sense.
It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analagous to the life of the spirit.
The Literary Fiction of Stephen J. Bergstrom 
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