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ONCE AGAIN THE WONDER
Page
Count: 232 Richard
Quinney is the author of several books that combine autobiographical
writing with photography, including Journey to a Far Place, For
the Time Being, Borderland, and Where Yet the Sweet Birds Sing.
His other books are in the academic field of sociology. He and his
wife live in Madison, Wisconsin and on the family farm in Walworth
County. Borderland
Books borderlandbooks.net |
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In
the course of a decade at century's end, Richard Quinney kept close
watch and recorded in his journal the events of daily living. Any
sense of the universal and the extraordinary was necessarily grounded
in ordinary experience. The author lived in a prairie town in northern
Illinois, within easy driving distance of his family farm, as he
made the observations and wrote the personal essays that make up
this book. Experiencing the sublime in everyday life is in the long
tradition of the romantic poets, transcendental writers, and landscape
painters, and all who remain close to the natural world. "Grace,"
as Georges Bernanos has the country priest write in a diary, "is
everywhere." This everyday life of ours, as Henri Lefebvre
noted, is "the most universal and the most unique condition."
Although we live in an historical era in which all aspects of everyday
life are mediated by larger events and structures, everyday life
is the source of both personal and social transformation. The lived
experience-shared with others-is our social reality. And it is the
only significant reality we can know in the living of this ordinary
life.