BEW
WARE
Compromise, Hell!
We have powerful political opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only ofparts ofthe Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time like the famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be eaten all at once. The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If we continue to be economically dependent on destroying parts of the Earth, then eventually we will destroy it all. So long acomplaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end. With hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning: Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans don’t have to live bydestroying the sources of their life. People can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contemp to four land’s exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems, and I will offer a short list of practical suggestions. We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. We need to quit thinking of rural America as a colony. Too much of the economic history of our land has been that ofthe export Huel, food, and raw materials that have been destructively and too cheaply produced. We must reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work. For that we will need better accounting than we have had so far.We need to reconsider the idea
of solving our economic problems by “bringing in industry.” Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by “tax incentives” and other squanderings ofthe people’s money. We ought to suspend that prac- tice until we are sure thatin everystate we have made the most and the best ofwhat is alreadythere. We need to build the local economies ofour communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere. We need to confront honestly the issue of scale.Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally. And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land-for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country’s defense, become the agents of our country’s destroyers, compromising on its ruin. And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patriot and an indomitable foe of strip mining, the late Joe Begley of Blackey: “Compromise, hell!”
WE NEED TO
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Awake At 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 like awake and turn and look intothe 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, one with the earth again, and let the world go.
To Know the Dark / To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
The Familiar / The hand is risen from the earth, the sap risen, leaf come back to branch, bird to nest crotch. 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.
The Springs / In a country without saints or shrines I knew one who made his pilgrimage to springs, where in his life’s dry years his mind held on. Everlasting, people called them, and gave them names. The water broke into sounds and shinings at the vein mouth, bearing the taste of the place, the deep rock, sweetness out of the dark. He bent and drank in bondage to the ground.
A Wet Time / The land is an ark, full of things waiting. Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks filling with water as the foot is raised. The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands become obscure in their use, prehistoric. The mind passes over changed surfaces like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs and to the thought of swimming and wading birds. Along the river croplands and gardens are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch holding the new nest of the hummingbird the river flows heavy with earth, the water turned the color of broken slopes.
THE HIS
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Are You Alright?
Elton stopped the truck. He turned off his headlights and the engine, and the quietness of the moonlight and the woods came down around us. I could hear the peepers again. It was wonderful what the road going under the water did to that place. It was not only that we could not go where we were used to going; it was as if a thought that we were used to thinking could not be thought.“Listen!” Elton said. He had heard a barred owl off in the woods. He quietly rolled the window down. And then, right overhead, an owl answered: “HOOOOOAWWW!” And the far one said, “Hoo hoo hoohooaw!” “Listen!” Elton said again. He was whispering.The owls went through their whole repertory of hoots and clucks and cackles and gobbles.“Listen to them!” Elton said. “They’ve got a lot on their minds.” Being in the woods at night excited him. He was a hunter. And we were excited by the flood’s interruption of the road. The rising of the wild water had moved us back in time. Elton quietly opened his door and got out and then, instead of slamming the door, just pushed it to. I did the same and came around and followed him as he walked slowly down the road, looking for a place to climb out of the cut. Once we had climbed the bank and stepped over the fence and were walking among the big trees, we seemed already miles from the truck. The water gleamed over the bottomlands below us on our right; you could not see that there had ever been a road in that place. I followed Elton along
the slope through the trees. Neither of us thought to use a flashlight, though we each had one, nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything-underfoot the blooms of twinleaf, bloodroot, rue anemone, the little stars of spring beauties, and overhead the littlest branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the rain, and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around us seemed to float in the shadows so that we walked like waders among stars, uncertain how far down to put our feet. And over the broad shine of the backwater, the calling of the peepers rose like another flood, higher than the water flood, and thrilled and trembled in the air. It was a long walk because we had to go around the inlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow. Way off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Once we startled a deer and stood still while it plunged away into the shadows. And always we were walking among flowers. I wanted to keep thinking that they were like stars, but after a while I could not think so. They were not like stars. They did not have that hard, distant glitter. And yet in their pale, peaceful way, they shone. They collected their little share of light and gave it back. Now and then, when we came to an especially thick patch of them, Elton would point. Or he would raise his hand and we would stop a minute and listen to the owls. I was wider awake than I had been since morning would have been glad to go on walking all night long.
Biography / 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. Although Berry’s tenets echo those of many of his literary ancestors in American literature, his advice is more critical than that of his predecessors, for we now more than ever threaten our existence with destructive potentials unimaginable only a few decades ago. Berry explains our critical condition in “The Loss of the Future,” an essay in The LongLegged House: We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the earth or submit to such an involvement in our destructiveness that the earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed. And we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying. (46)
Selected Works / Berry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. (CH) New York: Harcourt, 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
What Are People For? (WPF) San Francisco: North Point, 1990. Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry Studies 2.1 (1971): 7-15. Driskell, Leon V. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 5: 62-66. Ehrlich, Arnold W. “Wendell Berry” (An interview with Wendell Berry). Publishers Weekly 5 Sept. 1977: 10-11. Norman, Gurney. From This Valley. Kentucky Educational Television Video.
“The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16-22. (Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?)
Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and Myth Again.” The Southern Review 20 (1984): 958-68.
The Long-Legged House. (LLH) New York: Harcourt, 1969.
Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9-14.
Standing by Words. (SBW) San Francisco: North Point, 1983. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986.