Wendell Berry

The Perpetrator Pretends to Be a Victim

It’s a funny thing about fraud. It’s a bit like poisoning a well. Once you’ve done it, there’s not really any going back, either for the water or for you. I guess people wanting to use the well could conceivably purify the water after the fact, but that would take both an honest assessment of the poisoning, and expert knowledge of how to get poison out of water. Lacking either of those elements, the water is poisoned—that’s that.