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Selected Works Page 6 Page 8 Page 10 Page 12 Page 14 Page 16 Page 18 Page 20
Biography Awake at Night Compromise, Hell! (an excerpt) The Silence Are You Alright? (an excerpt) The Morning’s News For the Rebuilding of a House The Supplanting
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Wendel
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ll Berry
Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Among his novels (set in the fictional 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).
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Night
Late in the night I pay the unrest lowe to the life that has never lived and cannot live now. What the world could be is my good dream and my agony when, dreaming it I lie awake and turn and look into the dark. I think of a luxury in the sturdiness and grace of necessary things, not in frivolity. That would heal the earth, and heal men. But the end, too, is part of the pattern, the last labor of the heart: to learn to lie still, on with the earth again, and let the world go.
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WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY— I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so. We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians—be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
neglect or destroy the economic landscapes—the farms and ranches and working forests—and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don’t uphold the health of the land and the people and the people’s work.
Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we
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Hell!
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What must a man do to be at home in the world? There must be times when he 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 weariness of engines and of his own heart, his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him as though his bones fade beyond thought into the shadows that grow out of the ground so that the furrow he opens in the earth opens in his bones, and he hears the silence of the tongues of the dead tribesman buried here a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind rain! What songs he will hear!
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Are You
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Flora was inclined to be amused at the way Elton and I imagined the worst. She did not imagine the worst. She just dealt with mortality as it happened. I picked up a flashlight as I went out the door, but it was not much needed. The moon was big, bright enough to put out most of the stars. I walked And yet I heard Elton’s pickup while it was out to the mailbox and made myself still a long way off, and then light glowed in comfortable, leaning against it. Elton the air, and then I could see his headlights. and I had obliged ourselves to worry He turned into the lane and stopped and about the Rowanberrys, but I was pushed the door open for me. I made room glad all the same for the excuse to be for myself among a bundle of empty feed out. The night was still, the country sacks, two buckets, and a chain saw. all silvery with moonlight, inlaid with bottomless shadows, and the air “Fine night,” he said. He had lit a cigarette, shimmered with the trilling of peepers and the cab was fragrant with smoke. from every stream and pond margin for miles, one full-throated sound filling “It couldn’t be better, could it?” the ears so that it seemed impossible that you could hear anything else. “Well, the moon could be just a little brighter, and it could be a teensy bit warmer.”
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To moralize the state, they drag out a man and bind his hands, and darken his eyes with a black rag to be free of the 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 himself lonely among the creatures, and set himself aside, so that he cannot work in the sun with hope, or sit at peace in the shade of any tree. The morning’s news drives sleep out of the 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.
The Mor I look at my sloping fields not turning green with the young grass of April. 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 of the 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.
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rning’s News
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To know the inhabiting reasons of trees and streams, old men 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.
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The Supplanting
Where the road came, no longer bearing men, but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape, the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle with white bloom. For a while in the years of its wilderness a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire to the remnants of house and shed, and let time hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me something that would not bear my name—something that bears us through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.
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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
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This book was created by Alyssa Celentano in Spring 2013 for Washington University in St. Louis’ Typography II class in St. Louis, Missouri. It is printed on 64 lb Strathmore charcoal paper. It uses black and white found photography and the typefaces Helvetica and Baskerville MT.