"Two Hearts" by Paper Route, Tuesday, February 15, 2022

Industrialization has come at a major cost. Kentucky-born-and-raised author, poet, activist, and farmer Wendell Berry critiques modern life as being disconnected with nature and thus a root cause of the climate change we see today. One of Berry's most beloved poems, "The Peace of Wild Things," shows how nature can free the speaker from existential anxiety. With modern life unrelenting and with the anxiety of financing an indie band after their record label folded, with the passing of loved one and a divorce, Paper Route dug into raw emotion lyrically, and yet something held the band together. Taking the title of the album from Berry's poem, Paper Route's The Peace of Wild Things is a romantic album with a few dark undertones.

EVERY CIRCLE WAS A LINE JUST CONNECTED BY DESIGN. The second track on The Peace of Wild Things,  "Two Hearts" builds the themes of love and marriage from the first track, "Love Letters." The songs are convincing love songs, though, lead singer JT Daly had gone through a divorce prior to recording the album. Later tracks on the album, such as the following track "Better Life," "Glass Heart Hymn," and "Tamed," seem to address these hard times. "Two Hearts" is about a romantic connection "by design." This, of course, is uttered by many romantics and even spouted in wedding vows. "God Gave Me You" and whatnots. And all that sentiment is forgotten in the ugly divorce process. Cynicism aside, love is real even if it fails, and who can judge if it wasn't supposed to end because people change. And because you don't find love on the first trial, it's not fair to say it doesn't exist.  

I NEED YOU TO KNOW. I listened to a speech Wendell Berry gave in 1981 titled “People, Land, and Community," in which the author talks about the need for sustainable farming communities as opposed to the industrial farming. In the speech, though, he had some profound words about marriage being a commitment much like all commitments people make to build a community. He says: 

        We can commit ourselves fully to anything: a place, a discipline, a life's work, a

        child, a family, a community, a faith, a friend, only in the same poverty of

        knowledge, the same ignorance and result, the same self subordination, the same

        final forsaking of other possibilities. Marriage is an institution and requires vows

        because it can be made only in the eclipse of what we call information, and in the

        impossibility of what we call informed decisions. All our commitments are like

        this. We do not know enough to make them and whether or not we have made

        them publicly with vows, we know that they cannot be unmade without 

        penalties.

Marriage always requires a leap of faith, as do most human commitments. We can devote our lives to something and end up realizing that it was a dead end. Berry's ideals of a farm-based economy center around families sounds unrealistic in our current technology-driven world. Learning to work with nature rather than against it, yields better results in the environmental crisis we face. But just like it would be great to live off the land and eat only organic, it doesn't always work. And marriage doesn’t  always work. Maybe it should work a lot more than it's failing, but wistfully longing for the ideal isn't going to make it last.  

 

Read “Two Hearts” by Paper Route on Genius