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"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." Rilke

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Synonyms of affection

1: a feeling of liking and caring for someone or something : tender attachment : FONDNESS

She had a deep affection for her parents.

Middle English affeccioun "capacity for feeling, emotion, desire, love," borrowed from Anglo-French, "desire, love, inclination, partiality," borrowed from Latin affecti\u014dn-, affecti\u014d "frame of mind, feeling, feeling of attachment," from affec-(variant stem of afficere "to produce an effect on, exert an influence on") + -ti\u014dn-, -ti\u014d, suffix of action nouns

Referench: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affection

philostorgos: tenderly loving

Original Word:\u03c6\u03b9\u03bb\u03cc\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c1\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2, \u03bf\u03bd

Phonetic Spelling:(fil-os'-tor-gos)

Definition:tenderly loving

Usage:tenderly loving, kindly affectionate to

Reference: https://biblehub.com/greek/5387.htm

For the full text of the Jefferson Lecture 2012, by Wendell Barry, please visit: https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-biography

Photo by Guy Mendes

Quoted excerpts from the lecture:

\u201cBecause a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,\u201d [Margaret] said. \u201cThis craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won\u2019t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.E. M. Forster, Howards End\xa0(1910) p.

"The term \u201cimagination\u201d in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb \u201cto imagine\u201d contains the full richness of the verb \u201cto see.\u201d To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with \u201cthe mind\u2019s eye.\u201d It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with \u201cdreaming up.\u201d It does not depend upon one\u2019s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy."

"But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don\u2019t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word \u201caffection\u201d and the terms of value that cluster around it\u2014love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence\u2014have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful.

It is by imagination that knowledge is \u201ccarried to the heart\u201d (to borrow again from Allen Tate).

The faculties of the mind\u2014reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest\u2014are not distinct from one another. Though some may be favored over others and some ignored, none functions alone. But the human mind, even in its wholeness, even in instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited.

The fact is that we humans are not much to be trusted with what I am calling statistical knowledge, and the larger the statistical quantities the less we are to be trusted. We don\u2019t learn much from big numbers. We don\u2019t understand them very well, and we aren\u2019t much affected by them."

((Who Owns America?\xa0edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, ISI Books, Wilmington, DE, 1999,\xa0 pages 109\u2013114. (First published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1936.)

[Nature] "As Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund Spenser that she is of all\xa0creatures \u201cthe equall mother, / And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.\u201d

(The Faerie Queene, VII, vii, stanza XIV.)

"To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we \u201cknow\u201d that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined. The economic hardship of one farm family, if they are our neighbors, affects us more painfully than pages of statistics on the decline of the farm population. I can be heartstruck by grief and a kind of compassion at the sight of one gulley (and by shame if I caused it myself), but, conservationist though I am, I am not nearly so upset by an accounting of the tons of plowland sediment borne by the Mississippi River. Wallace Stevens wrote that \u201cImagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.\u201d

(Opus Posthumous, edited, with an Introduction by Samuel French Morse, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1957, page 176.)

"But we need not wait, as we are doing, to be taught the absolute value of land and of land health by hunger and disease. Affection can teach us, and soon enough, if we grant appropriate standing to affection. For this we must look to the stickers, who \u201clove the life they have made and the place they have made it in.\u201d

"E. M. Forster\u2019s novel, Howards End, published in 1910. By then, Forster was aware of the implications of \u201crural decay,\u201d and in this novel he spoke, with some reason, of his fear that \u201cthe literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. . . . and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.\u201d (Howards End, page 15, 112).

Margaret\u2019s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book:\xa0 \u201cIt all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don\u2019t you see?\u201d (Ibid., page 214).

To have beautiful buildings, for example, people obviously must want them to be beautiful and know how to make them beautiful, but evidently they also must love the places where the buildings are to be built. For a long time, in city and countryside, architecture has disregarded the nature and influence of places.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within? (Ibid., page 30)."

\u201cThe light within,\u201d I think, means affection, affection as motive and guide. Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time. Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. The factual knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust, leads only to hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an ultimate fact or smallest particle that at last will explain everything.

Margaret\u2019s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book:\xa0 \u201cIt all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don\u2019t you see?\u201d

The great reassurance of Forster\u2019s novel is the wholeheartedness of his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery, by things unseen. But Forster\u2019s interest throughout is in soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk:\xa0 truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger.

Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished.

But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.