An inadequate tribute to Wendell Berry.
Recently I referenced the passing of Wendell Berry in a social media post and was hesitant to try and say much about him because I didn’t think I could give him the credit he is due. But I feel that someone who was such an inspiration deserves a little more. And while I am not an expert on the man (I have read most but not all his work), I feel like I should try to give a better introduction so that people might be intrigued enough to go find his work for themselves.
Wendell Berry was a Kentuckian and a farmer from Henry County. He was a graduate of the University of Kentucky and later returned to teach there and live on his family farm. He wrote over 50 books of all kinds, most notably a series of novels that took place in a fictional Kentucky town called Port William that was based off his hometown. He also wrote essays such as The Unsettling of America which I have referenced several times and many books of poetry. He famously never owned a computer and wrote everything with a pencil and a pad of paper.
One of the central themes I picked up from Mr. Berry is how progress for progress’s sake is not worth it if we have to destroy our world to get it. As John Prine would say, “…they tortured the timber and they stripped all the land. Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken, then they wrote it all off as the progress of man.”
For me, his writing shows proof that not everything that is new is better. Wendell remembers times of neighbors helping neighbors, when the local community was of most importance to the people that live in it and strong communities led to a strong country. And it cannot work the other way around. A person in Washington D.C. can’t make decisions regarding the intricacies of every small town in America. We must work from the bottom up, just as the soil in a garden must be strong and healthy for us to receive good fruit in the end.
If we think of our computer age and our phones, we are connected to things all over the world and have opinions about things that don’t actually affect us. But because we can go everywhere on our phone, we neglect the people and things around us that truly affect our lives.
Mr. Berry was also a great proponent of farming on a small scale that focused first on the soil.
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
This opinion plays a huge part in the way we treat the land on our farm and if more people farmed with this mentality I think we would see a lot of things being done differently.
I could try to go on, but as I keep writing it feels increasingly inadequate trying to summarize someone’s life. So, if you like novels, his Port William series is a great picture of small town life in rural Kentucky in the 20th century. For the most part, you can read any book independently because they do not follow an order but tell the stories of lives of people within the town. As Nick Offerman said, The Unsettling of America should be required reading for every high school freshman in the country. It explains the importance of the land and details how the agriculture system got to where it is today. If you like short stories he has several collections, but Watch with Me has one of my favorite stories about Ptolemy Proudfoot, and I think one of the funniest things he wrote.
I’ll leave you with two of his poems.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-Wendell Berry
A Meeting
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
-Wendell Berry