Dear Reader,
I hope you’ve had a chance to listen to last week’s podcast on abortion with Catherine Aubrecht. It was a difficult subject, but Catherine was a fantastic guest. I was pleased with how it turned out.
I also trust you received yesterday’s normal Friday newsletter. Lots of news in that one.
In addition to the podcast, another “perk” of being a paid subscriber is an in-depth monthly book review on something I’m reading. These will be long-essay form with plenty of excerpts to get a feel for the book (and not just my musings about it).
For January, Peaches and I chose one of our favorite authors—Wendell Berry—and his most recently published collection of agrarian essays. Here’s a short paragraph from the back cover:
“The writing gathered in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horse, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.”
And here’s a little on Wendell (yes, we’re on a first-name basis, though he doesn’t know that):
“Wendell Berry is an essayist, novelist, and poet. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry Country, Kentucky.”
Thanks for supporting my writing here at Second Drafts. I hope you enjoy the review and maybe even pick up some Wendell if you do!
Craig
PS: If you’d like a sneak peek at what February’s book will be, scroll to the bottom!
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
I have no reason to doubt author Paul Kingsworth’s selection, titling, and introduction of this volume of Wendell Berry writings as “essential,” but when someone declares something as such, I do have questions:
According to whom?
By what criteria?
For now or forever?
Kingsworth, an English writer and former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, addresses a few of these questions in the last paragraph of his introduction to the book:
“Wendell Berry has been an extremely prolific writer, and this selection is chosen from hundreds of essays written over five decades. This means it is necessarily partial and personal and incomplete, and I have probably given everybody something to complain about. Still, to me, the essays between these covers represent some of the best of the writing and thoughts of a remarkable man—farmer, poet, novelist, philosopher—who deserves to be better known outside America than he is. I hope this volume will win him some new admirers in a time when voices like his are urgently needed.”
From “Introduction,” page x
Linguistically, “essential” is closely related to “essence,”
“the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character.”
Definition from Oxford Languages
But it’s not just linguistically that these two words are similar; unfortunately, in our modern/post-modern world, we often consider the essence of something by its essential worth; that is, we estimate its value not by what it intrinsically is, but by what it practically does.
For instance, when the weather makes the roads atrocious, only “essential” personnel are asked to be out on them to meet a specific need; the same has been true these past two years of Covid, when only “essential” personnel were to be at hospitals, lest we lose those who serve a medical purpose along with those sick with Covid.
How easily we consider someone essential because of her function rather than of value because of her essence. We are a pragmatic people—ever after the latest and greatest utility—but rarely in the name of virtue, and always in the name of progress.
Thus it is now, when the essence of American agriculture has gone the way of the so-called essential workings of agribusiness, that we need our unlikely hero—essayist professor, novelist philosopher, farmer poet, Wendell Berry—and ask him to help us search for, identify, and act in a more sympathetic and sustainable way.
For those unfamiliar with Berry, a brief summary: a farm boy born in 1934 to a family with at least five generations on both sides who made their home in Henry County in the hills of Kentucky, Berry earned a B.A. (1956) and M.A. (1957) in English at the University of Kentucky. He attended attended Stanford University's creative writing program, studying under author Wallace Stegner, before publishing his first novel, Nathan Coulter, in 1960.
After a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship provided for Berry to take his wife and two children to Italy and France in 1961, he returned to the States to teach English at New York University from 1962 to 1964 before moving back to Kentucky, where he taught creative writing until 1977, then again from 1987 to 1993.
It was upon moving back to Kentucky in the summer of 1965 that Berry and his family purchased and moved to land outside of Lexington, where Berry farms and began writing (by pencil on paper—never with a typewriter or computer; you can read why in his essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” pages 236-243) at least 25 books of poems, 16 volumes of essays, and 11 novels and short story collections. He is one of few writers I can think of whose poetry, fiction, and non-fiction I equally enjoy.
If there is one theme running through most of Berry’s writings (and certainly throughout this collection), it is the relationship of the land to the people (and vice versa), and the interaction of the two. In his essay, “Think Little,” Berry outlines the difference between two different ways of thinking about this relationship:
“For most of the history of this country our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big. A better motto, and an essential one now, is Think Little. That implies the necessary change of thinking and feeling, and suggests the necessary work. Thinking Big has led us to the two biggest and cheapest political dodges of our time: plan-making and law-making. The lotus-eaters of this are in Washington, D.C., Thinking Big. Somebody perceives a problem, and somebody in the government up comes up with a plan or a law. The result, mostly, has been the persistence of the problem, and the enlargement and enrichment of the government.
But the discipline of thought is not generalization; it is detail, and it is personal behavior. While the government is ‘studying’ and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it—he is doing that work. A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word. A good farmer who is dealing with the problem of soil erosion on an acre of ground has a sounder grasp of that problem and cares more about it and is probably doing more to solve it than any bureaucrat who is talking about it in general. A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.”
From “Think Little” (1970), pages 54-55
Comparing and contrasting is one of Berry’s favorite literary devices, particularly when it involves illustrating the difference between agribusiness and agriculture. He writes in “Nature as Measure,”
“Industrial agriculture, built according to the single standard of productivity, has dealt with nature, including human nature, in the manner of a monologist or an orator. It has not asked for anything, or waited to hear any response. It has told nature what it wanted, and in various clever ways has taken what it wanted. And since it proposed no limit on its wants, exhaustion has been its inevitable and foreseeable result. This, clearly, is a dictatorial or totalitarian form of behavior, and it is as totalitarian in its use of people as it is in its use of nature. Its connections to the world and to humans and the other creatures become more and more abstract, as its economy, its authority, and its power become more and more centralized.
On the other hand, an agriculture using nature, including human nature, as its measure would approach the world in the manner of a conversationalist. It would not impose its vision and its demands upon a world that it conceives of as a stockpile of raw material, inert and indifferent to any use that may be made of it. It would not proceed directly or soon to some supposedly ideal state of things. It would proceed directly and soon to serious thought about our condition and our predicament. On all farms, farmers would undertake to know responsibly where they are and to ‘consult the genius of the place.’ They would ask what nature would be doing there if no one were farming there. They would ask what nature would permit them to do there, and what they could do there with the least harm to the place and to their natural and human neighbors. And they would ask what nature would help to do there. And after each asking, knowing that nature will respond, they would attend carefully to her response. The use of the place would necessarily change, and the response of the place to that use would necessarily change the user. The conversation itself would thus assume a kind of creaturely life, binding the place and its inhabitants together, changing and growing to no end, no final accomplishment, that can be conceived for foreseen.”
From “Nature as Measure” (1989), page 63
To drive the comparison/contrast methodology home, this passage illustrates how Berry accomplish the task more philosophically in, “Two Minds”:
“Obviously we need to use our intelligence. But how much intelligence have we got? And what sort of intelligence is it that we have? And how, at its best, does human intelligence work? In order to try to answer these questions I am going to suppose for a while that there are two different kinds of human mind: the Rational Mind and another, which, for want of a better term, I will call the Sympathetic Mind. I will say now, and try to keep myself reminded, that these terms are going to appear to be allegorical, too neat and too separate—though I need to say also that their separation was not invented by me.
The Rational Mind, without being anywhere perfectly embodied, is the mind all of us are supposed to be trying to have. It is the mind that the most powerful and influential people think they have. Our schools exist mainly to educate and propagate and authorize the Rational Mind. The Rational Mind is objective, analytical, and empirical; it makes itself up only by considering facts; it pursues truth by experimentation; it is uncorrupted by preconception, received authority, religious, or feeling. Its ideal products are the proven fact, the accurate prediction, and the ‘informed decision.’ It is, you might say, the official mind of science, industry, and government.
The Sympathetic Mind differs from the Rational Mind, not by being unreasonable, but by refusing to limit knowledge or reality to the scope of reason or factuality or experimentation, and by making reason the servant of things it considers precedent and higher.
The Rational Mind is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. Its purpose is to exclude everything that cannot empirically or experimentally be proven to be a fact.
The Sympathetic Mind is motivated by fear of error of a very different kind: the error of carelessness, of being unloving. Its purpose is to be considerate of whatever is present, to leave nothing out.
The Rational Mind is exclusive; the Sympathetic Mind, however failingly, wishes to be inclusive.
These two types certainly don’t exhaust the taxonomy of minds. They are merely the two that the intellectual fashions of our age have most deliberately separated and thrown into opposition.”
From “Two Minds” (2002), pages 180-181
By way of these (and other) essays, we understand that Berry is calling his readers to make a choice, one that ultimately comes down to choosing between a more ancient view of conversing with the world than the more modern/post-modern practice of shouting at it that we have all grown up with and been indoctrinated by.
For Berry (a Christian), the Scriptures - in particular Genesis, Proverbs, and the Gospels—serve as an example of our responsibility to care for Creation and its story:
“The Rational Mind, while spectacularly succeeding in some things, fails completely when it tries to deal in materialist terms with the part of reality that is spiritual. Religion and the language of religion deal approximately and awkwardly enough with this reality, but the Rational Mind, though it apparently cannot resist the attempt, cannot deal with it at all.
But most of the most important laws for the conduct of human life probably are religious in origin—laws such as these: Be merciful, be forgiving, love your neighbors, be hospitable to strangers, be kind to other creatures, take care of the helpless, love your enemies. We must, in short, love and care for on another and the other creatures. We are allowed to make no exceptions. Every person’s obligation toward the Creation is summed up in to words from Genesis 2:15: ‘Keep it.’”
From “Two Minds” (2002), page 197
In “Damage” (one of Berry’s shortest essays at five pages, and the first of his I ever read), he tells the story of a well-intentioned attempt to improve his farm. He writes,
“I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.
About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on which I thought I could make a small pond. I hired a man with a bulldozer to dig one. He cleared away the trees and then formed the pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt in a curving earthwork on the lower.
The pond appeared to be a success. Before the bulldozer quit work, water had already begun to seep in. Soon there was enough to support a few head of stock. To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed it with grass and clover.
We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.
The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.
I was careful to get expert advice. But this only exemplifies what I already knew. No expert knows everything about every place, not even everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.
In general, I have used my farm carefully. It could be said, I think, that I have improved it more than I have damaged it.
My aim has been to go against its history and to repair the damage of other people. But now a part of its damage is my own.
The pond was a modest piece of work, and so the damage is not extensive. In the course of time and nature it will heal.
And yet there is damage - to my place, and to me. I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.
Until that wound in the hillside, my place, is healed, there will be something impaired in my mind. My peace is damaged. I will not be able to forget it.”
From “Damage” (1974), pages 98-99
It is a self-convicting story like this one that makes Berry so likable, not only as a writer, but also as a fellow human being. In his non-fiction essays, as well as in his fictional magnum opus, Jayber Crow, Berry teaches from strength as well as from weakness; he is not afraid to draw attention to himself or the flaw of his characters (many of which are representative of his wrong thinking personified) for insights from either. This maturity and security comes out in his writing, as his stories and explanations of failure are not overly defensive, but more humbly confessional.
Of all the essays that Berry writes, however, those capturing the plight of and advocating for the small farmer against the agribusiness conglomerates, academic intellectuals, and government agencies are my favorites. Berry pulls no punches as to his views of the company, collegiate, and congressional con men of the past hundred years, and he serves as an important critic and historian of their touted “progress.”
“To the corporate and political and academic servants of global industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community are not known, are not imaginable, and are therefore unthinkable, except as damaging stereotypes. The people of the ‘cutting edge’ in science, business, education, and politics have no patience with the local love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly native to their places and therefore good caretakers of their places. This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of home employment and home economies. The office or the factory or the institution is the place for work. The economic function of the household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods. Under industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive, and farms fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from production.
The idea of people working at home, as family members, as neighbors, as natives and citizens of their places, is as repugnant to the industrial mind as the idea of self-employment. The industrial mind is an organizational mind, and I think this mind is deeply disturbed and threatened by the existence of people who have no boss. This may be why people with such minds, as they approach the top of the political hierarchy, so readily sell themselves to ‘special interests.’ They cannot bear to be unbossed. They cannot stand the lonely work of making up their own minds.
The industrial contempt for anything small, rural, or natural translates into contempt for uncentralized economic systems, any sort of local self-sufficiency in food or other necessities. The industrial ‘solution’ for such systems is to increase the scale of work and trade. It is to bring Big Ideas, Big Money, and Big Technology into small rural communities, economics, and ecosystems—the brought-in industry and the experts being invariably alien to and contemptuous of the places to which they are brought in. There is never any question of propriety, of adapting the thought or the purpose or the technology to the place.
The result is that problems correctable on a small scale are replaced by large-scale problems for which there are no large-scale corrections. Meanwhile, the large-scale enterprise has reduced or destroyed the possibility of small-scale corrections. This exactly describes our present agriculture. Forcing all agricultural localities to conform to economic conditions imposed from afar by a few large corporations has caused problems of the largest possible scale, such as soil loss, genetic impoverishment, and ground-water pollution, which are correctable only by an agriculture of locally adapted, solar-powered, diversified small farms—a correction that, after a half century of industrial agriculture, will be difficult to achieve.
The industrial economy thus is inherently violent. It impoverishes one place in order to be extravagant in another, true to its colonialist ambition. A part of the ‘externalized’ cost of this is war after war.”
From “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), pages 134-135
In his writings, Berry stands not just against the agricultural industrialists, but for the small farmer. In the essay, “The Prejudice Against Country People,” he writes,
“Disparagements of farmers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as ‘provincial’ can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, literary magazines, and so on. A few years ago, The New Republic affirmed the necessity of the decline of family farms in a cover article entitled, “The Idiocy of Rural Life.’ And I remember a Kentucky high school basketball cheer that instruct the opposing team:
“Go back, go back, go back to the woods.
Your coach is a farmer and your team’s no good.”I believe it is a fact, proven by their rapidly diminishing numbers and economic power, that the world’s small farmers and other ‘provincial’ people have about the same status now as enemy civilians in wartime. They are the object of small, ‘humane’ consideration, but if they are damaged or destroyed ‘collaterally,’ then ‘we very much regret it’ but they were in the way—and, by implication, not quite as human as ‘we’ are. The industrial and corporate powers, abetted and excused by their many dependents in government and the universities, are perpetrating a sort of economic genocide—less bloody than military genocide, to be sure, but just as arrogant, foolish, and ruthless, and perhaps more effective in ridding the world of a kind of human life. The small farms and the people of small towns are understood as occupying the bottom step of the economic stairway and deservedly falling from it because they are rural, which is to say not metropolitan or cosmopolitan, which is to say socially, intellectually, and culturally inferior to ‘us.’
Am I trying to argue that all small farmers are superior or that they are all good farmers or that they live the ‘idyllic life’? I certainly am not. And that is my point. The sentimental stereotype is just as damaging as the negative one. The image of the farmer as the salt of the earth, independent son of the soil, and child of nature is a sort of lantern slide projected over the image of the farmer as simpleton, hick, or redneck. Both images serve to obliterate any concept of farming as an ancient, useful, honorable vocation, requiring admirable intelligence and skill, a complex local culture, great patience and endurance, and moral responsibilities of the gravest kind.”
From the essay, “The Prejudice Against Country People” (2001), pages 203-204
Berry then cuts to the chase as to from where the diminishing rhetoric originates:
“The unacknowledged question beneath the dismissal of the agrarian small farmers is this: What is the best way to farm—not anywhere or everywhere, but in every one of Earth’s fragile localities? What is the best way to farm this farm? In this ecosystem? For this farmer? For this community? For these consumers? For the next seven generations? In a time of terrorism? To answer those questions, we will have to go beyond our preconceptions about farmers and other ‘provincial’ people. And we will have to give up a significant amount of scientific objectivity, too. That is because the standards required to measure the qualities of farming are not just scientific or economic or social or cultural, but all of those, employed all together.”
From the essay, “The Prejudice Against Country People” (2001), page 206
In other words, one size does not fit all, and it takes the local farmer to figure it out.
If there are critiques of Berry (at least of his non-fiction), they are that his message is perhaps “too little, too late” in terms of where modern agriculture has come, as well as that his traditional views (he is 87 years old, but it’s an old 87 years) don’t fit the mindset of a modern world that would rather not think too hard about lessons of the past or conservation for the future. (Oh, he can also seem too unrealistic and critical.)
Jedidiah Briton-Purdy of The Nation wrote in his 2019 article, “A Shared Place: Wendell Berry’s Life-long Dissent,” that,
“Throughout his work, Berry likes to iron out paradoxes in favor of building a unified vision, but he is himself a bundle of paradoxes, some more generative than others. A defender of community and tradition, he has been an idiosyncratic outsider his whole life, a sharp critic of both the mainstream of power and wealth and the self-styled traditionalists of the religious and cultural right. A stylist with an air of timelessness, he is in essential ways a product of the late 1960s and early ’70s, with their blend of political radicalism and ecological holism. An advocate of the commonplace against aesthetic and academic conceits, he has led his life as a richly memorialized and deeply literary adventure. Like Thoreau, Berry invites dismissive misreading as a sentimentalist, an egotist, or a scold. Like Thoreau, he is interested in the integrity of language, the quality of experience—what are the ways that one can know a place, encounter a terrain?—and above all, the question of how much scrutiny an American life can take.”
And in her 2017 Plough Quarterly article, “The Hole in Wendell Berry’s Gospel: Why the Agrarian Dream Is Not Enough,” Tamara Hill Murphy argues of his fiction that,
“The dissonance with Berry occurs when I consider other family tales buried under the agrarian beauty. These are stories of shattered relationships, addiction, job loss, abandonment, mental illness, and unspoken violations that seem to separate my kinfolk from the clans in Port William. In Berry’s fictional village, readers occasionally witness felonies, infidelity, drunken brawls, and tragic deaths, but all of them seem to be told in a dusky, warming light.
The pleasure I experience reading a novel set in idyllic Port William, before war, agribusiness, and corporate industrialism pillage the town, turns quickly from a nostalgic glow to an ugly flame. I agree with the author’s animosity toward institutional and human greed, but I’m troubled by the apparent evils he chooses to overlook. Berry seems to cast mercy on certain kinds of frailties and judgment on others. As a loyal reader, this double standard agitates me: I become a mad reader of the Mad Farmer.”
For me, Berry simply says what needs to be said, and in a way—again, whether poetic, fiction, and non-fiction—that paints a cohesive and consistent biblical picture of Creation care that stands in stark contrast to our current exploitation reality.
Berry’s is a voice crying in the wilderness on behalf of the wilderness—not from the cuckoo perspective of an environmentalist who has never actually worked land in his life, but from the vantage point of a man born onto the land where he still lives, moves, and has his being. As a result, Berry has worked out a deep respect, theology, and praxis concerning the land and our interaction with it, and I can only hope for more scribbles from his pen on paper before he, like the rest of us, goes from ashes to ashes and dust to dust and back into his beloved earth, awaiting physical resurrection.
February’s Peaches’ Pick: Fools Crow
A couple of subscribers have asked that I publish in advance the next book to be reviewed so they can read it before the review comes out. Since this month focused on a non-fiction offering, February’s book review will be on the novel, Fools Crow by James Welch, a book recommended to me by a friend from church who grew up on the Yakama reservation in Washington state. Here’s the back cover write-up:
“In the Two Medicine Territory of Montana, the Lone Eaters, a small band of Blackfeet Indians, are living their immemorial life. The men hunt and mount he occasional horse-taking raid or war party against the enemy Crow. The women tan the hides, sew the beadwork, and raise the children. But the year is 1870, and the whites are moving into their land. Fools Crow, a young warrior and medicine man, has seen the future and knows that the newcomers will punish resistance with swift retribution. First published to broad acclaim in 1986, Fools Crow is James Welch’s stunningly evocative portrait of his people’s bygone way of life.”
As always, thanks for reading. T-shirts have been ordered and, barring any “supply chain issues” (getting pretty tired of that phrase), should be to you mid-February!