A Lonely House in Charity Valley

The Korean painting above was posted with its story by Peter Kim — 仁谷幽居圖. I was reminded of what Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky said in The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture:

Old Chinese landscapes reveal, among towering mountains, the frail outline of a roof or a tiny human figure passing along a road on foot or horseback. These landscapes are almost always populated. There is no implication of dehumanized interest in a nature for "its own sake." What is represented is a world in which human beings belong, but which does not belong to human beings in any tidy economic sense; the Creation provides a place for humans, but it is even greater than humanity and within it even great men are small. Such humility is the consequence of accurate insight, ecological in its bearing, not a pious deference to "spiritual" value.