The real work of planet-saving

XXIII. The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love), pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous. 

XXIV. The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering after glamour. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem. I don't think that planet-saving, if we take it seriously, can furnish employment to many such people. 

XXV. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem—to face the great problem one small life at a time.

—Wendell Berry, "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse" (1991)

'the subtle enmity of fame'

Young man anywhere, in whom something stirs that makes you shiver, profit by the fact that no one knows you. And if they contradict you who hold you of no account, and if they give you up entirely whom you frequent, and if they would extirpate you because of your precious thoughts—what is this obvious danger, which holds you concentrated within yourself, against the subtle enmity of fame, later, which renders you innocuous by scattering you?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)

Dilemma

"Dilemma"

David Budbill

I want to be

famous

so I can be

humble

about being

famous.

What good is my

humility

when I am

stuck

in this

obscurity?