WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY
A Collection of selected works by Wendell
Berry
February 2, 1968
IN THE DARK OF THE MOON, IN FLYING SNOW, IN THE DEAD OF WINTER, WAR SPREADING, FAMILIES DYING, THE WORLD IN DANGER,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
A Jonquil for Mary Penn (an excerpt) Daylight was full in the windows now.
Only a day before yesterday it had been spring-warm, sunny, and still. Wildflowers were starting up in the leafless woods, and she found a yellow crocus in the yard. And then this dry and bitter wind had come, driving down from the north as if it were as long and wide as time, and the sky was as gray as if the sun had never shone. The wind went through her coat, pressed her fluttering skirt tight against her legs, tore at her scarf. It chilled her to the bone. She went first to the privy in a back corner of the yard and then on to the henhouse, where she shelled corn for the hens and gave them fresh water. They had had a hard enough time of it their first winter. They had no fuel, no food laid up. Elton had raised a crop but no garden. He borrowed against the crop to buy a meat hog. He cut and hauled in firewood. He worked for wages to buy groceries, but the times were hard and he could not always find work. Sometimes their meals consisted of biscuits and a gravy made of lard and flour. And yet they were often happy. Often the world afforded them something to laugh about. Elton stayed alert for anything that was funny and brought the stories home. He told her how the tickle-ass grass got into Uncle Isham’s pants, and how Daisy Hample clucked to her nearsighted husband and children like a hen with halfgrown chicks, and how Jonah Hample, missing the steps, walked off the edge of Braymer Hardy’s front porch, fell into a rosebush, and said, “Now, I didn’t go to do that!”
On a bright, still day in the late fall, after all the leaves were down, she had stood on the highest point .She knew which smoke came from which house. It was like watching the rising up of prayers or some less acknowledged communication between Earth and Heaven. She could not say herself how it made her feel. At his best, Elton was a man in lovewith her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times she lived inn his love as in a spacious house. Walter Cotman always spoke of Mary as Elton’s “better half” In spite of his sulks and silences, she would not go so far as “better.” That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half? When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.
But now th was not im
hat wholeness maginable. The fire had burned low in the stove. Though she still wore her coat, she was chilled again and shaking. For a long time, perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now misery alerted her again to the room. The wind ranted and sucked at the house’s comers. She could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody off in the distance were shaking a great rug. She felt, not a draft, but the whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against her. She went into the other room, but the fire there also needed building up. She could not bring herself to do it. She was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying down. Standing near the stove, she undressed, put on her nightgown again, and went to bed. When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Though the wind was still blowing hard, the room was full of sunlight. The lamp on the narrow mantelshelf behind the stove was filled and clean, its chimney gleaming, and so was the one on the stand by the bed. Josie Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she had draped over her lap. She was bowed over her work, filling in with her needle and a length of yellow thread the bright corolla of a jonquil —- or “Easter lily,” as she would have called it. She was humming the tune of an old hymn, something she often did while she was working, apparently without awareness that she was doing it.
Her voice was resonant, low, and quiet, barely audible, as if it were coming out of the air and she, too, were merely listening to it. The yellow flower was nearly complete. And so Mary knew all the story of her day. Elton, going by Josie Tom’s in the half-light, had stopped and called. She could hear his voice, raised to carry through the wind: “Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over to Walter’s to plow.” So he had known. He had thought of her. He had told Josie Tom. Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom raised her head and smiled. “Well, are you awake? Are you all right?” “Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said. And she slept again.
Our Children, Coming of Age In the great circle, dancing in and out of time, you move now toward your partners, answering the music suddenly audible to you that only carried you before and will carry you again. When you meet the destined ones now dancing toward you, we will be in line behind you, out of your awareness for the time, we whom you know, others we remember whom you do not remember, others forgotten by us all.
When you meet, and hold love in your arms, regarldess of all, the unkown will dance away from you toward the horizon of light. Our names will flutter on these hills like little fires
The Silence What must one do to be at home in the world? There must be times when she is here as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven shadows of the grass and the flighty darknesses of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond the sense of the weariness of engines and of her own heart,
wrongs grown old It must be with her as though her bones fade beyond thought into the shadows that grow out of the ground so that the furrow she opens in the earth opens in his bones, and she hears the silence of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up before her, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind rain! What songs she will hear!
unforgiven. for en.
WE AMERICANS ARE NOT USUALLY THOUGHT TO BE A SUBMISSIVE PEOPLE, BUT OF COURSE WE ARE.
Compromise, Hell! (an excerpt) WE ARE DESTROYING OUR
are wasting, polluting, and making
COUNTRY –- I mean our country
ugly this beautiful land for the sake
itself, our land. This is a terrible
of patriotism and the love of God?
thing to know, but it is not a reason
Perhaps some ofus would like to
for despair unless we decide to
think so, but in fact this destruction
continue the destruction. Ifwe
is taking place because we have
decide to continue the destruction,
allowed ourselves to believe, and
that will not be because we have
to live, a mated pair of economic
no other choice. This destruction is
lies: that nothing has a value that
not necessary. It is not inevitable,
is not assigned to it by the market,
except that by our submissiveness
and that the economic life of our
we make it so.
communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people,
We citizens have a large
but of course we are. Why else
responsibility for our delusion
would we allow our country to be
and our destructiveness, and I
destroyed? Why else would we be
don’t want to minimize that. But I
rewarding its destroyers? Why else
don’t want to minimize, either, the
would we all-by proxies we have
large responsibility that is borne
given to greedy corporations and
by government. It is commonly
corrupt politicians be participating
understood that governments
in its destruction? Most of us are
are instituted to provide certain
still too sane to piss in our own
protections that citizens
cistern, but we allow others to do
individually cannot provide for
so, and we reward them for it. We
themselves. But governments
reward them so well, in fact, that
have tended to assume that this
those who piss in our cistern are
responsibility can be fulfilled
wealthier than the rest of us. How
mainly by the police and the
do we submit? By not being radical
military services. They have used
enough. Or by not being thorough
their regulatory powers reluctantly
enough, which is the same thing.
and often poorly. Our governments
Can we actually suppose that we
have only occasionally recognized
the need of land and people to
a colony of the coal, timber, and
be protected against economic
agribusiness corporations, yielding
violence. It is true that economic
an immense wealth of energy and
violence is not always as swift, and
raw materials at an immense cost to
is rarely as bloody, as the violence
our land and our land’s people.
of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic
Because as individuals or even as
aggression can destroy a landscape
communities we cannot protect
or a community or the center of a
ourselves against these aggressions,
town or city, and they routinely do
we need our state and national
so. Such damage is justified by its
governments to protect us. As the
BECAUSE OF THAT corporate perpetrators and their
poor deserve as much justice from
political abettors in the name of the
our courts as the rich, so the small
“free market” and “free enterprise,”
farmer and the small merchant
but this is a freedom that makes
deserve the same economic justice,
greed the dominant economic virtue,
the same freedom in the market,
and it destroys the freedom ofother
as big farmers and chain stores.
people along with their communities
They should not suffer ruin merely
and livelihoods. There are such
because their rich competitors can
things as economic weapons of
afford (for a while) to undersell
massive destruction. We have
them. The logic of this sort of
allowed them to be used against us,
compromising is clear, and it
not just by public submission and
is clearly fatal. Ifwe continue to
regulatory malfeasance, but also
be economically dependent on
by public subsidies, incentives, and
destroying parts of the Earth, then
sufferances impossible to justify.
eventually we will destroy it all.
We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense.
So long a complaint accumulates a
As a result, our once-beautiful and
debt to hope, and I would like to end
bountiful countryside has long been
with hope. To do so I need only repeat
FAILURE OUR TOWNS AND CITIES HAVE BEEN GUTTED BY THE LIKES OF WAL-MART, WHICH HAVE HAD THE PERMITTED LUXURY OF DESTROYING LOCALLY OWNED SMALL BUSINESSES..
THERE IS NO DI BETWEEN A DO THREAT TO THE OF OUR LIFE AN FOREIGN ONE.
IFFERENCE OMESTIC E SOURCES ND A
BIGNESS PROMOTE DAMAGE, AND OFTE
ES GREED, INDIFFERENCE, AND EN BIGNESS IS NOT NECESSARY. something I said at the beginning:
that of the export of fuel, food,
Our destructiveness has not been,
and raw materials that have been
and it is not, inevitable. People
destructively and too cheaply
who use that excuse are morally
produced. We must reaffirm the
incompetent, they are cowardly, and
economic value ofgood stewardship
they are lazy. Humans don’t have
and good work. For that we will
to live by destroying the sources
need better accounting than we
oftheir life. People can change;
have had so far.
they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved
We need to reconsider the idea
by love ofour land to rise above
of solving our economic problems
thegreedand contempt ofour land’s
by “bringing in industry.” Every state
exploiters. This of course leads to
government appears to be scheming
practical problems, and I will offer a
to lure in a large corporation from
short list of practical suggestions.
somewhere else by “tax incentives” and other squanderings ofthe
We have got to learn better to
people’s money. We ought to suspend
respect ourselves and our
that practice until we are sure
dwelling places.
that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is
We need to quit thinking of rural
already there. We need to build the
America as a colony.
local economies of our communities
Too much of the economic
and regions by adding value to
history of our land has been
local products and marketing them
locally before we seek markets
corporation to process local food or
elsewhere.
local timber and market it locally.
We need to confront honestly the issue ofscale. Bigness has a charm
And, finally, we need to give an
and a drama that are seductive,
absolute priority to caring well for
especially to politicians and
ourland-for every bit of it. There
financiers; but big- ness promotes
should be no compromise with
greed, indifference, and damage,
the destruction of the land or of
and often bigness
anything else that we cannot
not necessary.
You may need a large corporation to
replace. We have been too tolerant
run an airline or to manu- facture
of politicians who, entrusted with
cars, but you don’t need a large
our country’s defense, become the
corporation to raise a chicken
agents of our country’s destroyers,
or a hog. You don’t need a large
compromising on its ruin.
COMPROM
And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patnot and an indomitable foe of strip mining, the late Joe Begley of Blackey:
MISE, HELL!
The Morning News To moralize the state, they drag out a man, and bind his hands, and darken his eyes with a black rag to be free ofthe light in them, and tie him to a post, and kill him. And I am sickened by complicity in my race. To kill in hot savagery like a beast is understandable. It is forgivable and curable. But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath, that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell. The serpent is gentle, compared to man. It is man, the inventor of cold violence, death as waste, who has made himselflonely among the creatures, and set himselfaside, so that he cannot work in the sun with hope, or sit at peace in the shade ofany tree. The morning’s news drives sleep out ofthe head at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake in the agony of the old giving birth to the new without assurance that the new will be better. I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s, they are so open to the world. I look at my sloping fields now turning
What m
green with the young grass ofApril. What must I do to go free? I think I must put on a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die rather than enter into the design of man’s hate. I will purge my mind ofthe airy claims of church and state. I will serve the earth and not pretend my life could better serve. Another morning comes with its strange cure. The earth is news. Though the river floods and the spring is cold, my heart goes on, faithful to a mystery in a cloud, and the summer’s garden continues its descent through me, toward the ground.
must I do to go free?
For the Rebuilding of the House To know the inhabiting reasons of trees and streams, old men and women who shed their lives on the world like leaves,
I watch them go, And I go. I build the place of my leaving The days arc into vision like fish leaping, their shining caught in the stream. I watch them go in homage and sorrow. I build the place of my dream. I build the place of my leaving that the dark may come clean.
WENDELL BERRY lives and farms with his family in
In a commencement address
Henry County, Kentucky, and is the
delivered in June 1989 at the College
author of more than thirty books of
of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine,
fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Berry gave some advice that to most
He grew up amidst the Great
modern graduates would sound old
Depression and witnessed the
fashioned, indeed backward. But
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in
the advice he gave was timeless,
America. He actively protested the
and his reminder seems apocalyptic
Vietnam War, denounced the EPA on
in view of the world’s current
its policies regarding coal-ash, and
environmental crisis and, as Berry
has been featured in the New York
sees it, America’s cultural crisis.
Times for a criticism on President
In a sense, Berry’s deliverance of
Bush’s post-9/11 National Security
such a critical message parallels
policies. Berry is often associated
Moses’ deliverance of the Ten
with conservatism but he is wary
Commandments, for Berry’s advice
of movements and parties on the
is also a prescription for cultural
whole. He does not affiliate himself
healing through the imposition of
with neither major American
a set of laws.
political party.
1. Beware the justice of Nature. 2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature. 3. Understand that no amount
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made. 6. Put the interest of the community first. 7. Love your neighbors –- not the
of education can overcome
neighbors you pick out, but the
the innate limits of human
ones you have.
intelligence and responsibility.
8. Love this miraculous world
We are not smart enough or
that we did not make, that is
conscious enough or alert
a gift to us.
enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale. 4. In making things always bigger
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood,
and more centralized, we make
and household –- which thrive
them both more vulnerable in
by care and generosity –- and
themselves and more dangerous
independent of the industrial
to everything else. Learn,
economy, which thrives
therefore, to prefer small-scale
by damage.
elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work.
Bibliography Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories.
“The Futility of Global Thinking.”
New York and San Francisco:
Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16-22.
Pantheon Books, 1992
(Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?)
Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point
Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and
Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
Myth Again.” The Southern Review
1987
20 (1984): 958-68.
Berry, Wendell. The Way of
Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.”
Ignorance and Other Essays.
Dictionary of Literary Biography 6:
Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005
9-14.
Berry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. (CH) New York: Harcourt, 1972.
This book was created by Alex Chiu, a junior at Washington University in St. Louis. All poems, essays, and short stories belong to acclaimed writer Wendell Berry. All images belong to their respective owners. This book was set in United Sans Regular and Univers, and printed on a variety of papers, all under 80 pounds.
We must learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time:
History plays an integral role in shaping our culture and personal views. Remove the spine and start from the front, reading from right to left instead, for a collection of a series of events that correspond with Wendell Berry’s personal political views.