Time & Perspective Quote by Wendell Berry

Berry opens with a disarming provocation: the past is not a backdrop, it is a boundary line. "The past is our definition" sounds almost bureaucratic, like identity reduced to paperwork, and that is the point. He is pushing back against the modern fantasy of self-invention as clean break - the idea that you can shed history the way you delete an app. For Berry, the past is not optional metadata; it is the soil you are already standing in.

The real move happens in the syntax. "We may strive, with good reason, to escape it" grants the moral legitimacy of wanting out - out of family damage, national shame, inherited violence, personal mistake. Berry is not romanticizing tradition for its own sake. The subtext is sharper: repudiation alone is a trap because it still lets the past set the terms. If your whole project is escape, you remain defined by what you are fleeing.

"Only by adding something better to it" reframes change as accrual rather than erasure. Berry's agrarian ethic is humming underneath: improvement looks like cultivation, not demolition. In a culture hooked on rebrands and purges - politically, personally, technologically - his line insists on a slower, harder kind of agency: repair. You do not defeat inheritance by declaring yourself new; you defeat it by building a worthier inheritance for whoever comes next. That is both chastening and empowering, because it makes progress measurable in what you leave behind, not what you disown.