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A remembrance of Wendell Berry
Published about 11 hours ago • 5 min read
The Man Who Stayed Put
On Wendell Berry, who died this week at ninety-two
Wendell Berry's formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more. (p. x)
There is a particular kind of grief that comes when someone dies whom you never met and yet felt you had been walking beside for years. Wendell Berry died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on the land his family had farmed for generations. He was ninety-two. I have been sitting with the news for a few days now, and what I feel is not only sorrow but a kind of chastening. I thought I had learned from him. I am beginning to suspect I had only admired him, which is not the same thing at all.
What he chose
The bare facts of his life are, by the standards of literary careers, almost perverse. He went to Stanford and studied under Wallace Stegner. He won a Guggenheim and spent a year in Tuscany. By twenty-eight he was teaching at New York University, which for a young writer in the early sixties was about as close to the centre of things as one could get. And then he left. He went home to Henry County, bought a small farm on the Kentucky River, and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Everyone told him it was a mistake. He wrote about this in an essay called "A Native Hill," describing how the place had once been his by accident of birth and how, in returning, it became his by choice.
“I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hooked to live here the rest of my life. And once that was settled I began to see the place with a new clarity and a new understanding and a new seriousness.” (p. 8)
That distinction, between belonging by accident and belonging by choice, is, I think, the hinge on which everything else he wrote turns.
He farmed with horses. He wrote with a pencil. He refused, famously and a little stubbornly, to buy a computer– “If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one (p. 241)”-- and when people mocked him for it, he wrote an essay explaining himself that is funnier and more serious than his critics deserved. He simply asked of every tool a question most of us have forgotten how to ask: what does this cost, and who pays?
What he stood for
If I had to put it in a sentence, I would say Berry stood for the proposition that you cannot love what you do not know, and you cannot know what you will not stay with long enough to learn.
Everything follows from this. His fierce defence of small farms was not nostalgia; it was an argument that the health of the land depends on people who know a particular field well enough to notice when it is suffering. His suspicion of what he called the industrial economy was not a rejection of prosperity, but a rejection of prosperity achieved by not looking too closely at where things come from. Over years, we attend to what we love, and only that kind of attention produces real understanding.
He was hard on environmentalists, too. He thought we were too fond of wilderness and not fond enough of farms, too willing to protect the pristine and too indifferent to the worked and the ordinary. The land that feeds us, he insisted, deserves at least as much reverence as the land we set aside to visit. Most of the world is not wilderness. Most of the world is somebody's field, somebody's woodlot, somebody's back garden. If we cannot learn to care for those, our care for the remote and the beautiful will not save us.
And underneath all of it was a kind of religious seriousness that he never made easy or fashionable. He believed the world was a gift, and that the proper response to a gift is gratitude, and that gratitude expresses itself in care. His Sabbath poems, written over decades of Sunday walks in the woods above his farm, are perhaps the purest distillation of this: a man walking the same paths, year after year, and finding them inexhaustible.
What I have not yet learned
Here is my confession. I have been inspired by Berry. I have had his books on my shelves for years. And yet, when I am honest, I have treated him as a source of beautiful sentences rather than as a teacher with a discipline I might actually take up.
Because the discipline is hard. It is not the discipline of reading more or feeling more deeply. It is the discipline of staying. Of choosing one place and letting it teach you for decades. Of resisting the constant, well-argued invitations to be somewhere else, doing something larger. Berry's life was one long refusal of scale, and scale is precisely what our culture rewards. I feel that pull every day. I suspect you do too.
He also asked something of us that is harder still: to accept limits not as a defeat but as the very condition of a good life. A farm has edges. A body has a finite number of hours. A community can only be as large as the number of people who can actually know one another. Berry thought these limits were not obstacles to flourishing but its shape. I find I believe this in theory and rebel against it in practice, which is probably the most honest thing I can say about where I stand.
So I am going to try to learn from him properly now. Not by reading more, though I will. By walking the same stretch of ground more often. By asking, of the things I buy and use, the question he never stopped asking. By treating the ordinary land around me, the meadows and cornrows and neglected corners, with the same reverence I have reserved for mountains. By staying.
He wrote once that when a life is over, the decent thing is to die, and that the forest does not withhold itself from death. He did not withhold himself either. He gave his life, quite literally, to a few hundred acres and a small river town, and in doing so gave the rest of us a way of seeing that we will be a long time catching up with.
Rest well, Mr Berry. The hill is still there. I am going to go and sit on mine.
Berry, Wendell. The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. Counterpoint Press. USA. 2017
Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
