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Wendell BerrySelected Works

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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”

Wendell Berry

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4 Published Works

FidelityHannah CoulterJayber CrowThe Memory of Old JackNathan CoulterA Place on EarthRememberingThat Distant LandWatch with MeThe Wild BirdsA World Lost

Another Turn of the CrankThe Art of the CommonplaceCitizenship PapersA Continuous HarmonyThe Gift of Good LandHarlan Hubbard: Life and WorkThe Hidden WoundHome EconomicsLife Is a MiracleThe Long-Legged HouseRecollected Essays: 1965-1980

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and CommunityStanding by WordsThe Unforeseen WildernessThe Unsettling of AmericaWhat Are People For?

Short Stories Essays

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The Broken GroundClearingCollected Poems: 1951-1982

The Country of MarriageEntriesFarming: A Hand BookFindingsGivenOpeningsA PartSabbathsSayings and DoingsThe Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1998)

A Timbered ChoirThe Wheel

Poetry

6 Biography

Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In a commencement address delivered in June 1989 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Berry gave some advice that to most modern graduates would sound old fashioned, indeed backward. But the advice he gave was timeless, and his reminder seems apocalyptic in view of the world’s current environmental crisis and, as Berry sees it, America’s cultural crisis. In a sense, Berry’s deliverance of such a critical message parallels Moses’ deliverance of the Ten Commandments, for Berry’s advice is also a prescription for cultural healing through the imposition of a set of laws. Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching, his home and family, and all that each involves are extraordinarily integrated. He understands his writing as an attempt to elucidate certain connections, primarily the

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interrelationships and interdependencies of man and the natural world. One of his premises in The Unsettling of America at once evinces his notion of cultural and natural interdependency:

The Unsettling of America is about connections and thus ramifications.

“Everything in the Creation is related to everything else & dependent on everything else”

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Where the road came, no longer bearing men,but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape, the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle with white bloom. For a while in the years of its wilderness a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire to the remnants of house and shed, and let timehurry in the flame. I fired it so that all would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me something that would not bear my name-something thatbears us through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

The Supplanting

9On the Hill

Late at Night

The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness of the grass, fathomless, the long blades rising out of the well of time. Cars travel the valley roads below me, their lights finding the dark, and racing on. Above their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard, and felt the country turn under the stars toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here between the bright silent thousands of stars and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground. The hill has grown to me like a foot. Until I lift the earth I cannot move.

10The Satisfactions of

the Mad Farmer

Growing weather; enough rain; the cow’s udder tight with milk; the peach tree bent with its yield; honey golden in the white comb-,

the pastures deep in clover and grass, enough, and more than enough;

the ground, new worked, moist and yielding underfoot, the feet comfortable in it as roots;

the early garden: potatoes, onions, peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots, radishes, marking their straight rows with green, before the trees are leafed,’

raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage, currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage, strawberries red ripe with the white flowers still on the vines-pickedwith the dew on them, before breakfast,

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grape clusters heavy under broad leaves, powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness - an ancient delight, delighting;

the bodies of children, joyful without dread of their spending, surprised at nightfall to be weary;

the bodies of women in loose cotton, cool and closed in the evenings of summer, like contented houses’,

the bodies of men, able in the heat and sweat and weight and length of the day’s work, eager in their spending, attending to nightfall, the bodies of women;

sleep after love, dreaming white lilies blooming coolly out of the flesh;after sleep, enablement to go on with work, morning a clear gift;

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the maidenhood of the day, cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass; the work of feeding and clothing and housing, done with more than enough knowledge and with more than enough love, by those who do not have to be told;

any building well built, the rafters firm to the walls, the walls firm, the joists without give, the proportions clear,the fitting exact, even unseen, bolts and hinges that turn home without a jiggle;

any work worthy of the day’s maidenhood;

any man whose words lead precisely to what exists, who never stoops to persuasion;

the talk of friends, lightened and cleared by all that can be assumed;deer tracks in the wet path, the deer sprung from them, gone on; live streams, live shiftings of the sun in the summer woods;

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the great hollow-trunked beech, a landmark I loved to return to, its leaves gold-lit on the silver branches in the fall: blown down after a hundred years of standing, a footbridge over the stream;

the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire;

a little clearing among cedars, white clover and wild strawberries beneath an opening to the sky -heavenly, I thought it, so perfect; had I foreseen it I would have desired it no less than it deserves;

fox tracks in snow, the impact of lightness upon lightness, unendingly silent.

What I know of spirit is astir in the world. The god I have always expected to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning, I have always expected to be a great relisher of this world, its good grown immortal in his mind.

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In the stilled place that once was a road going down from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders, and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between history’s death upon the place and the trees that would have come I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

Sowing

I walk heavy with seed

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To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and of various legumes, their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth. I have stirred into the ground the offaland the decay of the growth of past seasons and so mended the earth and made its yield increase. All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service, for when the will fails so do the hands and one lives at the expense of life. After death, willing or not, the body serves, entering the earth. And so what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song.

Enriching the Earth

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The career of rugged individualism in America has run mostly to absurdity,tragic or comic. But it also has done us a certain amount of good.

who went alone to jail in protest against the Mexican War. And that streak has continued in his successors who have suffered penalties for civil disobedience because of their perception that the law and the government were not always or necessarily right. This is individualism of a kind rugged enough, and it has been authenticated typically by its identification with a communal good. The tragic version of rugged individualism is in the presumptive “right” of individuals to do as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This is most frequently understood as the right to do whatever one pleases with one’s property. One’s property, according to this formulation, is one’s own absolutely. Rugged individualism of this kind has cost us dearly in lost topsoil, in destroyed forests, in the increasing

Rugged Individualism

There was a streak in Thoreau,

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toxicity of the world, and in annihilated species. When property rights become absolute they are invariably destructive, for then they are used to justify not only the abuse of things of permanent value for the temporary benefit of legal owners, but also the appropriation and abuse of things to which

but which can belong only to the public or to the entire community of living creatures: the atmosphere, the water cycle, wilderness, ecosystems, the possibility of life. This is made worse when great corporations are granted the status of “persons,” who then can also become rugged individuals, insisting on their right to do whatever they please with their property. Because of the overwhelming wealth and influence of these “persons,” the elected representatives and defenders of “the people of the United States” become instead the representatives and defenders of the corporations.

the would-be owners have no rights at all,

The comedy begins when these two rugged individualisms confront each other.

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It has become ever more clear that this sort of individualism has never proposed or implied any protection of the rights of all individuals, but instead has promoted a ferocious scramble in which more and more of the rights of “the people” have been gathered into the ownership of fewer and fewer of the greediest and most powerful “persons.” I have described so far what most of us would identify as the rugged individualism of the political right. Now let us have a look at the left. The rugged individualism of the left believes that an individual’s body is a property belonging to that individual absolutely: The owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of”sexual liberation”; in the popular assumption that marriage has been “privatized” and so made subordinate to the wishes of individuals; in the proposition that the individual is “autonomous”; in the legitimation of abortion as birth control-in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one’s spouse, oreven one’s own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one’s body. And this too is tragic, for it sets us “free” from responsibility and thus from the possibility of meaning.

20 The comedy begins when these two rugged (or “autonomous”) individualisms confront each other. Conservative individualism strongly sup- ports “family values” and abominates lust. But it does not dissociate itself from the profits accruing from the exercise of lust (and, in fact, of the other six deadly sins), which it encouarges in its advertisements. The “conservatives” of our day understand pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth as virtues when they lead to profit or to political power. Only as unprofitable or unauthorized personal indulgences do they rank as sins, imperiling salvation of the soul, family values, and national security. Liberal individualism, on the contrary, understands sin as a private matter. It strongly supports protecting “the environment,” which is that part of the world which surrounds, at a safe distance, the privately-owned body. “The environment” does not include the economic landscapes of agriculture and forestry or their human communities, and it does not include the privately-owned bodies of other people-all of which appear to have been bequeathed in fee simple to individualists.

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Conservative rugged individualists and liberal rugged individualists believe alike that they should be “free” to get as much as they can of whatever they want. Their major doctrinal difference is that they want (some of the time) different sorts of things. “Every man for himself ” is a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning night club, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. That language is another precious resource that cannot be “privatized.” A society wishing to endure must speak the language of care-taking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace.

“Every man for himself ”

22 Are You Alright?

Elton quietly opened his door and got out and then,instead of slamming the door, just pushed it to. I did thesame and came around and followed him as he walkedslowly down the road, looking for a place to climb out of the cut. Once we had climbed the bank and stepped over the fence and were walking among the big trees, we seemedalready miles from the truck. The water gleamed overthe bottomlands below us on our right; you could notsee that there had ever been a road in that place. I followed Elton along the slope through the trees. Neitherof us thought to use a flashlight, though we each hadone, nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything-underfoot the blooms of twinleaf,bloodroot, rue anemone, the little stars of spring beauties,and overhead the littlest branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the rain,and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around usseemed to float in the shadows so that we walked likewaders among stars, uncertain how far down to put ourfeet. And over the broad shine of the backwater, thecalling of the peepers rose like another flood, higher than

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the water flood, and thrilled and trembled in the air.It was a long walk because we had to go around theinlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow.Way off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Oncewe startled a deer and stood still while it plunged awayinto the shadows. And always we were walking amongflowers. I wanted to keep thinking that they were like stars, but after a while I could not think so. They werenot like stars. They did not have that hard, distant glitter.And yet in their pale, peaceful way, they shone.

Now and then, when we came to an especially thick patch of them, Elton would point. Or he would raise his hand and we would stop a minute and listen to the owls. I was wider awake than I had been since morningwould have been glad to go on walking all night long.Around us we could feel the year coming, as strong andwide and irresistible as a wind. But we were thinking, too, of the Rowanberrys. That we were in a mood to loiter and did not loiter wouldhave reminded us of them, if we had needed reminding.

They collected their little share of light and gave it back.

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“Ohhh, Mart! To go to their house, with the water up, would haverequired a long walk from any place we could havestarted. We were taking the shortest way, which left uswith the problem that it was going to be a little too short.The best we could do, this way, would be to come downthe valley until we would be across from the house butstill divided from it by a quarter mile or more of backwater.We could call to them from there. What if there were trouble? What if there were no answer? Well, they had a boat over there. If they needed us, one of them could set us over in the boat. But what if we got no answer? What if, to put the best construction upon silence, they could not hear us? Well, we could only go as near as we could get and call. So if our walk had the feeling of a ramble, it was no tone. We were going as straight to the Rowanberrys’house as the water and the lay of the land would allow.After a while we began to expect to see a light. And thenwe began to wonder if there was a light to see. I said, “They’re probably asleep.” “And now we’re found,” Elton said. He sang it, just that much of the old hymn, almost in a whisper. We went through a little more of the woods and

25climbed the fence into the Rowanberrys’ hill pasture. Wecould see their big barn standing up black now againstthe moonlight on the other side of the road, which wason high ground at that place, clear of the backwater. When we were on the gravel we could hear our steps. We walked side by side, Elton in one wheel track, I in the other, until the road went under the water again. Wewere as close to the house then as we could get withouta boat. We stopped and considered the distance. And then Elton cupped his hands around his mouth, and called,

We waited, it seemed, while Art had time to say, “Did you hear somebody?” and Mart to answer, “Well, Ithought so.” We heard the front door open. And then Art’s voice came across the water:

“Ohhh, Mart!

Ohhhhh, Art!”

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And Elton called back, “Are you allll riiight?” I knew they were. They were all right, and we were free to go back through the woods and home to sleep.

“Yeeeaaah?”

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28 Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. (CH) New York: Harcourt, 1972.

—. “The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16-22. (Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?)

—. The Long-Legged House. (LLH) New York: Harcourt, 1969.

—. Standing by Words. (SBW) San Francisco: North Point, 1983.

—. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986.

—. What Are People For? (WPF) San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

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Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry Studies 1971: 7-15.

Driskell, Leon V. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 5: 62-66.

Ehrlich, Arnold W. “Wendell Berry” (An interview with Wendell Berry). Publishers Weekly 5 Sept. 1977: 10-11.

Norman, Gurney. From This Valley. Kentucky Educational Television Video.

Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and Myth Again.” The Southern Review 1984: 958-68.

Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9-14.

This book was made by Sasha Yan for Typography 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.This book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro.No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the author’s permission.

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