wendellBERRY

A journey between death and life and death once more.

THE MAN
TO

FARMING
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn. His thought passes along the row ends like a mole. What miraculous seed has he swallowed that the unending sentence of his love ows out of his mouth like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water descending in the dark?

The man behind the writing

Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of more than thirty books of ction, non-ction, and poetry. Among his novels (set in the ctional community of Port William Kentucky) are Nathan Coulter (1960), A Place on Earth (1967), and The Memory of Old Jack (1974); short story collections include The Wild Birds (1986), Remembering (1988), Fidelity (1993), and Watch With Me (1994); collections of essays include, among many others, A Continuous Harmony (1972), The Unsettling of America (1977), Recollected Essays (1981), and Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community (=1993); and among his many volumes of poetry are A Part (1980), The Wheel (1982), Collected Poems (1985) and Entries (1984). Berrys 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 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: Everything in the Creation is related to everything else and dependent on everything else (46). The Unsettling of America is about connections and thus ramications.

Rugged Individualism
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. There was a streak ont in Thoreau, 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 identication 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 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 benet of legal owners, but also the appropriation and abuse of things to which the wouldbe owners have no rights at all, 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 inuence of these persons, the elected representatives and defenders of the people of the United States become instead the representatives and defenders of the corporations. 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 ofthe 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, or even 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. It makes unintelligible the selfsacrice that sent Thoreau to jail. The comedy begins when these two rugged (or autonomous) individualisms confront each other. Conservative individualism strongly supports family values and abominates lust. But it does not dissociate itself from the prots accruing from the exercise of lust (and, in fact, ofthe other six deadly sins), which it encourages in its advertisements. The conservatives of our day understand pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth as virtues when they lead to prot or to political power. Only as unprotable 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 privatelyowned body. The environment does not include the economic landscapes of agriculture and forestry or their human communities, and it does not include the privatelyowned bodies ofother people all of which appear to have been bequeathed in fee simple to the corporate individualists. 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. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of care taking, faithkeeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that cannot be privatized.

...In this world men are making plans, wearing themselves out, spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

In his world
The hill pasture, an open place among the trees, tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill dark oodwater moves down the river. The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing. I have climbed up to water the horses and now sit and rest, high on the hillside, letting the day gather and pass. Below me cattle graze out across the wide elds of the bottomlands, slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world men are making plans, wearing themselves out, spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

A Praise
His memories lived in the place like ngers locked in the rock ledges like roots. When he died and his inuence entered the air I said, Let my mind be the earth of his thought, let his kindness go ahead of me. Though I do not escape the history barbed in my esh, certain wise movements of his hands, the turns of his speech keep with me. His hope of peace keeps with me in harsh days the shell of his breath dimming away three summers in the earth.

A Jonquil for Mary Penn

Mary Penn was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton get up and light the lamp and renew the res. He dressed and went out with the lantern to milk and feed and harness the team. It was early March, and she could hear the wind blowing, rattling things. She threw the covers off and sat up on the side of the bed, feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her head lean down again onto her knees. But she got up, put on her dress and sweater, and went to the kitchen. Nor did she mention it when Elton came back in, bringing the milk, with the smell of the barn cold in his clothes. Howre you this morning? he asked her, giving her a pat as she strained the milk. And she said, not looking at him, for she did not want him to know how she felt, Just ne. He ate hungrily the eggs, sausage, and biscuits that she set in front of him, twice emptying the glass that he replenished from a large pitcher of milk. She loved to watch him eatthere was something curiously delicate in the way he used his large handsbut this morning she busied herself about the kitchen, not looking at him, for she knew he was watching her. She had not even set a place for herself.

Youre

not

he

Not very. Ill eat something after while. He put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred rapidly with the spoon. Now he lingered a little. He did not indulge himself often, but this was one of his moments of leisure. He gave himself to his pleasures as concentratedly as to his work. He was never partial about anything; he never felt two ways at the same time. It was, she thought, a kind of childishness in him. When he was happy, he was entirely happy, and he could be as entirely sad or angry. His glooms were the darkest she had ever seen. He worked as a hungry dog ate, and yet he could play at croquet or cards with the selfforgetful exuberance of a little boy. It was for his concentratedness, she supposed, if such a thing could be supposed about, that she loved him. That and her yen just to look at him, for it was wonderful to her the way he was himself in his slightest look or gesture. She did not understand him in everything he did, and yet she recognized him in everything he did. She had not been preparedshe was hardly prepared yetfor the assent she had given to him. Though he might loiter a moment over his coffee, the day, she knew, had already possessed him; its momentum was on him. When he rose from bed in the morning, he stepped into the days work, impelled into it by the tension, never apart from him, between what he wanted to do and what he could do. The little hillside place that they had rented from his mother afforded him no proper scope for his ability and desire. They always needed money, but, day by day, they were getting by. Though the times were hard, they were not going to be in want. But she knew his need to surround her with a margin of pleasure and ease. This was his need, not hers; still, when he was not working at home, he would be working, or looking for work, for pay. This morning, delaying his own plowing, he was going to help Walter Cot-

man plow his corn ground. She could feel the knowledge of what he had to do tightening in him like a spring. She thought of him and Walter plowing, starting in the early light, and the two teams leaning into the collars all day, while the men walked in the opening furrows, and the steady wind shivered the dry grass, shook the dead weeds, and rattled the treetops in the woods. He stood and pushed in his chair. She came to be hugged as she knew he wanted her to. Its mean out, he said. Stay in today. Take some care of yourself. You, too, she said. Have you got on plenty of clothes? When I get em all on, I will. He was already wearing an extra shirt and a pair of overalls over his corduroys. Now he put on a sweater, his work jacket, his cap and gloves. He started out the door and then turned back. Dont worry about the chores. Ill be back in time to do everything. All right, she said. He shut the door. And now the kitchen was a cell of still lamplight under the long wind that passed without inection over the ridges. She cleared the table. She washed the few dishes he had dirtied and put them away. The kitchen contained the table and four chairs, and the small dish cabinet that they had bought, and the large iron cookstove that looked more permanent than the house. The stove, along with the bed and a few other sticks of furniture, had been there when they came. She heard Elton go by with the team, heading out the lane. The daylight would be coming now, though the windowpanes still reected the lamplight. She took the broom from its corner by the back door and swept and tidied up the room. They had been able to do nothing to improve the house,

which had never been a good one and had seen hard use. The wallpaper, and probably the plaster behind, had cracked in places. The nish had worn off the linoleum rugs near the doorways and around the stoves. But she kept the house clean. She had made curtains. The curtains in the kitchen were of the same blue andwhite checkered gingham as the tablecloth. The bed stands were orange crates for which she had made skirts of the same cloth. Though the house was poor and hard to keep, she had made it neat and homey. It was her rst house, and usually it made her happy. But not now. She was sick. At rst it was a consolation to her to have the whole day to herself to be sick in. But by the time she got the kitchen straightened up, even that small happiness had left her. She had a fever, she guessed, for every motion she made seemed to carry her uneasily beyond the vertical. She had a oaty feeling that made her unreal to herself. And nally, when she put the broom away, she let herself sag down into one of the chairs at the table. She ached. She was overpoweringly tired.

asked.

The past is our denition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
Wendell Berry

I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead, their headsontes standing shoulder to shoulder the bones imprisoned under them. Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments! Pry open the vaults and the cofns so the dead may nourish their graves and go free, their acres traversed all summer by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.

AMONGST

FARMER

Familiar

The
The hand is risen from the earth, the sap risen, leaf come back to branch, bird to nest croch. Beans lift their heads up in the row. The known returns to be known again. Going and coming back, it forms its curves, a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.

Works Cited
Fiction Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992 Hannah Coulter, 2004 Jayber Crow, 2000 The Memory of Old Jack, 1974 Nathan Coulter, 1960 A Place on Earth, 1967 Remembering, 1988 That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004 Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Ne Quinch, 1994 The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986 A World Lost, 1996 Poetry The Broken Ground, 1964 Clearing, 1977 Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982 The Country of Marriage, 1973 Entries, 1994 Farming: A Hand Book, 1970 Given: New Poems, 2005 Openings, 1968 A Part, 1980 Sabbaths: Poems, 1987 Sayings and Doings, 1975 The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999 A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998 The Wheel, 1982 Essays Another Turn of the Crank, 1996 The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002 Citizenship Papers, 2003 A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972 Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992 Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987 Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005 In this world The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1981 Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990 The Hidden Wound, 1970 Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987 Life Is a Miracle, 2000 The Long-Legged House, 2004 Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981 Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992 Standing by Words, 1983 The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentuckys Red River Gorge, 1971 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977 What Are People For?, 1990

Bibliography

Colophon
This book was created by Michael Tarazi, a junior majoring in Communication Design at Washington University in St. Louis. All writen material is credited to Wendell Berry .