REFLECTIONS ON WENDELL BERRY
Wendell Berry’s is a lonely voice. His is a lonely voice because he has a vision of the way the world should be that is so at odds with the world in which we live that it seems like an impossibility. So when I read his fiction, and I have read his fiction steadily since the early 1980’s, it reads to me like a nostalgic chronicling of a world that has been irredeemably lost.
His fiction has been comfortable for me to read because the world he describes is so enticing, but it isn’t presented as if it were possible. They are the remembrances of an old man and if the only way they are possible is by becoming Amish, well that’s not exactly a possibility for this Jew. I find his fiction easy to read because I too wish I had lived in a different world where I lived my life differently. I too wish I lived in a small community (OK, in my case it would have been a shtetl), making my living through working the land, being so connected that it would have been difficult to imagine me doing anything else, living anywhere else. There are memorable characters in his fiction, Jack Beechum, Jayber Crow, Elton Penn, Burley Coulter, but the star is the hilly Kentucky land, the rich river bottoms, the thick woods, the scarred hillside fields that should never have been plowed. And I love agricultural land with a burning and somewhat inexplicable passion, having grown up in suburbia as an intellectual Jew amongst a community of people where the adults had the memory that food came from the ground and my peers firmly believed it came from the grocery store.
But if his fiction has been easy enough for me to compartmentalize, rereading his essays recently has simply not been. I read essays of his in the 80’s and burned to create a life tethered to the land. But I had no idea how to do that as a Jew who wanted a family, and I drifted away from reading the essays because, I realize now, they were threatening to me. I wanted, needed, to fit into mainstream society enough to have a family, and if I were going to do that, I needed to put essential parts of myself aside. And reading Berry made it harder to snooze through my life.
But it is time to wake up, I have realized. I can’t steward a piece of land for the next fifty years. I can’t develop the intimacy with the land that only time and attention can bring. I can’t physically raise livestock because of my age. I’m not going to get to dwell with a given piece of land for a long, long time, the dream I had as a younger man that I surrendered. But I also can’t live simply divorced from the land in suburbia. I’m writing this in January 2024 and I live in a sub division of maybe 80 houses, and I’m probably the only one who is still harvesting anything from my garden (carrots and kale). And yet, I’ve no real idea how to be intimate with a suburban landscape. I don’t think that’s even possible. It’s time for me to move.
Berry advocates for agrarianism. It’s a traditional idea, prominent in American thought, advocating for small independent farmholds, local economies, communal self-reliance. Berry draws on his family’s own history in Henry County Kentucky for a picture of communal life before the rise of the tractor and industrial agriculture. It’s an economic and spiritual perspective that weds the community of humans and the community of what David Abram calls the more than human world. Our human goal becomes to collectively work well with the rest of creation, taking our place as one being amongst many.
It is a powerful, impossible, unrealizable vision. And it is time for me to contribute what I can to realizing it.
