Wendellrangy, with a slight writers stoopstood on the porch, holding the door open with a wide smile. And it named Wendell Berry the recipient of its 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. By a long persistence of human choosing, not of human life but of the worlds life, which is both its and ours, everything would be changed: how we would live, how we would live together, how we would earn our living, how we would work. And like any good utopian, Berry also sees that the promised land is already at our feet: If we worked for the worlds life, in good faith, with sufficient love [i]t would make us happy as soon as we began to do it.. As we climbed a steep rise, Wendell talked about how the Fords had felled trees and extracted rocks, so that the hill could be plowed for tobacco. Publication of his first novel, Nathan Coulter, which was inspired by his experiences in Henry County, was followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed Berry and his wife, Tanya, to spend a few years living the expat writers life in Europe. His New York friends, imagining him surrounded by moonshine-swilling hillbillies and feuding clans, were sure he had consigned himself to intellectual death. Crowe and Wendell Berry, as well as his group's stellar new album, Flyin' High, whose Louisville release party is happening this week at Zanzabar. Berry has found a kind of salvationand a lifelong subjectin his stewardship of the land he farms in Kentucky. Wallace Stegner once wrote to him, Your books seem conservative. Yes, once, Berry said. Although Berry is enviably prolific, he doesnt find writing easy. I said Id thought they crowed only at dawn. Friends, we're mighty grateful to be bringing another year to a close, and to have been able to spend it with you either here at the Center or from afar with our various online events. 0. Writing about the tense reaction of his elders, he observed, I had scratched the wound of racism. Nick knew that Wendell would be stricken if he did not attend, so he came and sat on the cellar wall behind the house. One of the people at the sit-in was his friend HerbE. Smith, from a family of miners in Whitesburg. Berrys writing, like the seasons, has a cyclical quality, returning again and again to the same ideas. He replied that hes become more careful in his use of the word hope: Jesus said, Take no thought for the morrow, which I take to mean that if we do the right things today, well have done all we really can for tomorrow. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and . Someone took out a few panes and tried to get into my safe. We get the old myth of Robert E. Lee as a tragic gentleman soldier who hated slavery but fought for his love of Virginia, and the canard that however bad Southern chattel slavery was, the true horror of America came into view only after the war, when capitalism made slaves of us all, turned us all against one another, and ravaged the earth. The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky. Like when the cats leave you a dead mouse on the doorstep. It upsets her daughter, but, she said, I kind of love it when they do that. Indeed, he frames the whole book around hooks challenge that the true work of love is to repair what the artificial boundaries of race, class, gender, and (Berry adds) the human/natural has split apart. They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher. Without this, we risk conflagration: A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war., If readers were incredulous about Berrys claim that a pencil was a better tool than a computer, its not hard to imagine how many will react to his plea that we extend sympathy to a general whose army fought to perpetuate slavery in America. The novelist Colum McCann told The Atlantic in 2017 that Berrys poems have a real twinkle in their eyes in the face of a dark world. He recited The Mad Farmers Love Song, which features one of his favorite figures in the canon: O when the worlds at peaceand every man is freethen will I go down unto my love.O and I may go downseveral times before that. Wendell said to her, It sounds like youre starting a center. Mary had no idea how to run a nonprofit, but, she told me, I had what was left of a pretty good farm culture and a well-watered landscape.. He writes, My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor. He listened, and fretted, but kept going. Nor were enslaved people taken care of in order to complete their work more efficiently. I was among the people who warned him. Shoemaker, who now edits Berry at Counterpoint Press, told me that his books were popular with environmentalists, hippies, and civil-rights advocates: Wendell was a hero to those people, saying the unsayable out loud. His ideas about the virtues of agrarian societies had sweeping implicationsto solve the problems of the modern world required thoroughly reconceiving how we live. Although he has laid bare his entire life in print, he tightly guards his privacy. There were 1,501 farms in Henry County when Berry was a boy, and if the work was hard, it was also a way of life, with a coherent culture founded on neighborliness. After my father died, my mother xeroxed his correspondence with Berry and gave it to mea pile of letters that covered the years they worked together, 1964 to 1977. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.. And if there is one overriding theme that has always defined Berrys thinking (and has, to his critics, marked him as a dour Luddite), it is the sanctity and obligation to work with ones own hands, no matter how lowly the task. . Both sides had slaveowners among their ancestors. Our Home Place Meat markets and sells the rest of the beef. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. I am suggesting, he once wrote, that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic., I asked him if he retains any of his youthful hope that humanity can avoid a cataclysm. Mary put me in touch with two members of the program, Abbie and Joseph Monroe, a couple in their thirties with two young children and another expected this April. This extended synthesis of the history of agriculture, the history of race, and the history of work is something new for Berry, and The Need to Be Whole is at its best when Berry, who often sounds like a homegrown, Christ-quoting mix of Karl Marx and the founder of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, argues that violence is so far our historys dominant theme, that the willingness to exploit people is never distinguishable from the willingness to destroy the land and that our race problem is intertangled with our land and land use problem, our farm and forest problem, our water and waterways problem, our food problem, our air problem, our health problem. Everything is connected, and what connects it is exploitation. Wendell E. Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, critic of culture, and farmer. hooks, who taught The Hidden Wound at Berea College, told Berry how moved she was by the image of a little boy intervening in a scene charged with the hidden violence of racism. Berry, though, wrote almost twenty years later that he considered it perhaps the least satisfying book hed ever writtenhed barely begun to make sense of the subject. But there are two points worth making. The Berry Center, with a staff of eight and a board of ten, attracts visitors from around the world who share many Americans sense of deracination. This elemental conflict between capitalism and agrarianism is also the driving tension in The Need to Be Whole, and Berry again recounts how capitalism has devastated the countryside (he is careful to distinguish country, the land on which we live, from nation, an imaginary thing for which he has little use): the staggering loss of topsoil; the concentration of farming by agribusiness; the increased reliance on heavily polluting, toxic fertilizers and pesticides; deforestation; mountaintop removal; climate changethe whole litany of environmental costs. Wendell maintained that the purpose of the Burley Association was to achieve fair prices, fairly determined, and with minimal help from the government., Berry often writes of trying to nurture a human economythe antithesis of Americas total economy, run by latter-day robber barons and the politicians who count on their donations. It was some instinctive love of wilderness that would always bring me back here, he wrote, but it was by the instincts of a farmer that I established myself., He turned himself around at the University of Kentucky, where he earned undergraduate and masters degrees in English. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, No, no, honey, then hastily explained himself: Thats our way of taking the sting out of it, you see, when we correct someone. He showed me the swirling grain of the mauls head, chopped from the roots of a tree, and swung it over his shoulder to demonstrate how it becomes a natural extension of the body. We are now reduced to one significant choice, Berry writes in the books final paragraph. Before the advent of commercial fertilizers, hill farmers needed the highly fertile fresh-cleared soil. He was heading for the annual tobacco auction, in Louisville. Joseph grew up in Dupont, Indiana (population three hundred and forty), where his parents ran two small farms and his father worked full time for the Department of Natural Resources. The cultural critic bell hooks, another Kentuckian, began reading Berry in college, finding his work fundamentally radical and eclectic. Decades later, she visited him at his farm to talk about the importance of home and community and the complexities of Americas racial divide. Always productive, by the 1970s Berry was publishing almost a book a year, a pace that has only just started to slacken. I sat in the passenger seat, resting my feet on a chainsaw, one of Berrys few labor-saving devices. An intelligent analysis might point out that every bite of Krugmans food, every sip of water he drinks, every bit of wood and stone and gravel and sand and metal and oil and cotton and wool and leather and rubber, every material aspect of his life came from the country and from those who live out here. All American Entertainment Named to Inc. Best Workplaces in 2022. A few hours west of the decapitated mountains of Appalachia is the part of Kentucky known as the Bluegrass region. Wendell Berry, America's foremost farmer-philosopher, with horses on his farm. Get our latest headlines delivered to your inbox daily. Youre not responsible for solving the whole problemyou just do what you can do., Four years ago, the Berry Center and Sterling College, an experiential learning school in Craftsbury, Vermont, started the Wendell Berry Farming Program, which provides twelve students tuition-free study on Henry County farms. I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, he wrote in his 1968 essay A Native Hill. He saw the rapacious practices of modern agribusiness, Big Coal, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street as the perpetuation of some intransigent destructiveness that drove the European settlers in America. Read more . The ducks, I learned, belong to their partners, Caleb and Kelly Fiechter, who live across the road. According to Tom Grissom, who is writing a book about the local history of tobacco, Berry was a member of his towns bank board, a trustee of his college, and a Sunday-school teacher at the Baptist church. I sat in the front row and when Wendell Berry came in and sat just down the way from me, I couldn't stop grinning. Berrys children sometimes struggled with the rigors of raising their own food, but they both stayed in the area and involved in farming. Berrys admirers call him an Isaiah-like prophet. He wanted to write an ambitious regional novel, but he was just stuck and depressed. At one point, Tanya suggested, Maybe you need to mature a bit. But his cussedness prevailed, and year by year the novel grew. For if everything is connected through the violence of American-style capitalism, then it can be reconnected according to lovenot the treacly, John Lennon Top 40 variety, but the radical love that Berry learned from his conversations with fellow Kentuckian bell hooks (published in hooks Belonging: A Culture of Place), with whom he opens his introduction. At the old Ford acreage, he showed me where the tobacco was taken after the harvest. He was named to be the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. Then he gave it all up. On a summer night near the end of the war, Lucinda saw men in uniform making off with her husband on horseback, and set out behind them on foot, in her nightgown. By Wendell Berry August 31, 2022 When advocating for justice in public life, it's easy to think we're championing the side of love against the side of hate. The white man, he wrote near the books end, preoccupied with abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth.. Berry made his name with The Unsettling of America, a furious polemic published in 1977. When Laura Dunn decided to make a film about America's foremost farmer-philosopher, Wendell Berry, she ran into one . There he was. Thinking that the elderly Berry might like to reacquaint himself with the young Berry, I mailed a letter to introduce myself. Wendell Berry's Advice for a Cataclysmic Age Sixty years after renouncing modernity, the writer is still contemplating a better way forward. This will never be presented to us as one large and final choice, but only as a succession of small choices, continuing to the seventh and the seven-hundredth generation. Though these choices are smallwhat food we eat and where it comes from, how we earn our livings and what we spend our time on, what we love and what we pay attention tothey are choices whose choosing will send us down different paths. All rights reserved. Today, some eighty per cent of U.S. government subsidies go to farms with revenues of more than a million dollars a year. If that were it, an analysis of exploitation that united race and agriculture, drawn from a lifetime of thinking on the subjects and delivered as a homiletic fire-and-brimstone sermon calling us all to work, a style which Berry has perfected, The Need to Be Whole would have done its work faithfully and well. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. I hope Berry gets his rest and returns to his good work. Ultimately, were using the curriculum as a way for farmers to make decisions informed by poetry, history, and literature, as well as the hard sciences.. Wendell invited Nick. Thanks for signing up! Republican gubernatorial candidate Quarles calls for medical cannabis in Kentucky, Ky. lawmakers advance bill to keep coal on power grid, citing reliability concerns, Hopkinsville women appointed to state boards, Christian County sewing group donates quilts to foster care children, 2022 Hoptown Chronicle | All rights reserved, New farmers come closer to fulfilling their dreams at Wendell Berry program in Kentucky, New compendium of Kentucky writer Wendell Berrys essays published, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Still, he offers a systems perspective applicable to startups and growing businesses that need to develop both staff and technology to thrive. It is a geologic upheaval. Entire mountaintops were torn off and cast into the valleys, he added. The University of Notre Dame has awarded its 2022 Richard H. Driehaus Prize to architect Rob Krier. As Liz ran into the pasture, Wendell and I went into the barn. Wendell Berry, Urban Planning, and Gleaning. I recognized the story, which he included in a piece of fiction in a recent issue of The Threepenny Review. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. They are actually profoundly revolutionary., Berry distrusts political movements, which, he writes, soon decline from any possibility of reasonable discourse to slogans, shouts, and a merely hateful contention in the capitols and streets. Still, he is a lifelong protester. You need a very settled team, because when it rose up, if you didnt look out, it would break your legor your neck.. When I told a friend, a dedicated organic gardener, that I was writing about Wendell Berry, she replied, I wonder if your father ever asked Berry to lighten up. Readers of his fiction and poetry might find that line of inquiry puzzling. A bakery up the road employs recovering opioid addicts. A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war.. He noted a few years ago, That insight has instructed and amused me very much, because she is right and so forthrightly right. In his new book, he has a characteristically bittersweet message: Because the age of global search and discovery now is endingbecause by now we have so thoroughly ransacked, appropriated, and diminished the globes original wealthwe can see how generous and abounding is the commonwealth of life. But he has never suggested that everyone flee the city and the suburbs and take up farming. Tanya once told him that his knack for repeating himself is his principal asset as a writer. Berry summons writers, from Homer to Twain, who extended understanding and sympathy to enemies, sinners, and outcasts: sometimes to people who happen to be on the other side or the wrong side, sometimes to people who have done really terrible things. In this spirit, he offers an assessment of RobertE. Lee, whom he calls one of the great tragic figures of our history. He presents Lee as a white supremacist and a slaveholder, but also as a reluctant soldier who opposed secession and was forced to choose between conflicting loyalties: his country and his people. In the meantime, he works in a Louisville restaurant, North of Bourbon, and volunteers with the nonprofit Feed Louisville. He opened the barn doors onto a cavernous space, where light filtered through the siding boards. ". The hero of the book is Nick Watkins, a Black man who worked for Wendells grandfather and lived in a two-room house on the Berry property. Half a dozen well-sharpened pencils were lined up on the worktable, alongside small stacks of paper. So I hope to do the right things today.. In the nineteen-twenties, with the original house in disrepair, Wendells bachelor great-uncle Curran Mathews painstakingly took apart what remained and used the lumber to make a camp along the Kentucky River, where he could escape the bounds of the accepted. 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