A Collection of Literature by Wendell Berry
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We clasp the hands of those that go before us, And the hands of those who come after us. We enter the little circle of each other’s arms And the larger circle of lovers, Whose hands are joined in a dance And the larger circle of all creatures Passing in and out of life Who move also in a dance To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it Except in fragments. 1
Local Knowledge in the Age of Information In 1983, reviewing a book of agricultural essays by Wes Jackson and one by me, Lewis Hyde suggested that our two books were part of an effort of the periphery to be heard by the center.
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This has stayed in my mind as perhaps the most useful thing that has been said about my agricultural writing and that of my allies. It is useful because the dichotomy between center and periphery does in fact exist, as does the tendency of the center to be ignorant of the periphery.
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These terms appear to be plain enough, but as I am going to use them here they may need a little clarification. We can say, for example, that a land grant university is a center with a designated periphery which it is supposed to maintain and improve. Or an industrial city is a center with a periphery which it is bound to influence and which, according to its politics and its power, it may either conserve or damage.
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Or a national or a state government is a center solemnly entrusted with responsibility for peripheral places, but in general it extends its protections and favors to the commercial centers, which outvote or out-”contribute” the periphery. But above all, now, as a sort of center of centers, is the global “free market” economy of the great corporations, the periphery of which is everywhere, and for its periphery this center expresses no concern and acknowledges no responsibility.
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Our Children, Coming of Age
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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, regardless of all, the unknown will dance away from you toward the horizon of light. Our names will flutter on these hills like little fires.
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Since my concern here is with the need for communication — or, as I would prefer to say, conversation — between periphery and center, I must begin with the center’s characteristic ignorance of the periphery. This, I suppose, must always have been so, even of the market towns of the world before the Renaissance.
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But in that older world, the cities and towns mostly (though with significant exceptions) could take for granted that their tributary landscapes were populated by established rural communities that knew both how to make the land produce and how to take care of it.
It is still true that the center is supported by the periphery. All human economy is still land-based. To the extent that we must eat and drink and be clothed, sheltered, and warmed, we live from the land. The idea that we have now progressed from a land-based economy to an economy based on information is a fantasy.
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It is still true also that the people of the center believe that the people of the periphery will always supply their needs from the land and will always keep the land productive: There will always be an abundance of food, fiber, timber, and fuel. This too is a fantasy. It is not known, but is simply taken for granted. As its power of attraction increases, the center becomes more ignorant of the periphery. And under the pervasive influence of the center, the economic landscapes of the periphery have fewer and fewer inhabitants who know them well and know how to care properly for them. Many rural areas are now populated mostly by urban people.
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Enriching the Earth
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To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and of various legumes, their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth. I have stirred into the ground the offal and the decay of the growth of past seasons and so mended the earth and made its yield increase. All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service, for when the will fails so do the hands and one lives at the expense of life. After death, willing or not, the body serves, entering the earth. And so what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song.
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Insofar as the center is utterly dependent upon the periphery, its ignorance of the periphery is not natural or necessary, but is merely dangerous. The danger is increased when this ignorance protects itself by contempt for the people who know. If the most intimate knowledge of the land from which you live belongs to people whom you consider to be provincials or field niggers or hillbillies or hicks or rednecks, then you are not likely ever to learn very much. Furthermore, the danger increases as the periphery is enlarged; the vulnerability of long supply lines is well understood. To give the most obvious example, the United States has chosen (if that is the right word) to become an import-dependent society rather than to live principally from its own land and the work of its own people, as if dependence on imported goods and labor can be consistent with political independence and self determination. This inconsistency is making us, willy-nilly, an imperial power, which perhaps increases “business opportunities� for our government’s corporate sponsors, but certainly increases our fragility and our peril. The economic independence of families, communities, and even regions has now been almost completely destroyed.
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A Jonquil for Mary Penn
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 day’s 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.
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Growing weather; enough rain; the cow’s udder tight with milk; the peach tree bent with its yield; honey golden in the white comb—, the pastures deep in clover and grass, enough, and more than enough; the ground, new worked, moist and yielding underfoot, the feet comfortable in it as roots; the early garden: potatoes, onions, peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots, radishes, marking their straight rows with green, before the trees are leafed’,
The Satisfactions a/the Mad Farmer
raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage, currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage, strawberries red ripe with the white flowers still on the vines — picked with the dew on them, before breakfast·, grape clusters heavy under broad leaves, powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness — an ancient delight, delighting; the bodies of children, joyful without dread of their spending, surprised at nightfall to be weary;
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the bodies of women in loose cotton, cool and closed in the evenings of summer, like contented houses’,
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the bodies of men, able in the heat and sweat and weight and length of the day’s work, eager in their spending, attending to nightfall, the bodies of women; sleep after love, dreaming white lilies blooming coolly out of the flesh; after sleep, enablement to go on with work, morning a clear gift; the maidenhood of the day, cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass; the work of feeding and clothing and housing, done with more than enough knowledge and with more than enough love, by those who do not have to be told; any building well built, the rafters firm to the walls, the walls firm, the joists without give, the proportions clear, the fitting exact, even unseen, bolts and hinges that turn home without a jiggle;
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any work worthy of the day’s maidenhood; any man whose words lead precisely to what exists, who never stoops to persuasion; the talk of friends, lightened and cleared by all that can be assumed; deer tracks in the wet path, the deer sprung from them, gone on;
live streams, live shiftings of the sun in the summer woods; the great hollow-trunked beech, a landmark I loved to return to, its leaves gold-lit on the silver branches in the fall: blown down after a hundred years of standing, a footbridge over the stream;
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the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; a little clearing among cedars, white clover and wild strawberries beneath an opening to the sky — heavenly, I thought it, so perfect; had I foreseen it I would have desired it no less than it deserves; fox tracks in snow, the impact of lightness upon lightness, unendingly silent. What I know of spirit is astir in the world. The god I have always expected to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning, I have always expected to be a great relisher of this world, its good grown immortal in his mind.
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She heard Elton go by with the team, heading out the lane. The daylight would be coming now, though the windowpanes still reflected 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 finish 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-and-white 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 first house, and usually it made her happy. But not now.
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The MwRoof On the housetop, the floor of the boundless where birds and storms fly and disappear, and the valley opened over our heads, a leap of clarity between the hills, we bent five days in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on the new, letting the sun touch for once in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then securing the house again in its shelter and shade. Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history has come between me and the sky.
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When the next year came, they began at the beginning, and though the times had not improved, they improved themselves. They bought a few hens and a rooster from Josie Braymer. They bought a second cow. They put in a garden. They bought two shoats to raise for meat. Mary learned to preserve the food they would need for winter. When the cows freshened, she learned to milk. She took a small bucket of cream and a few eggs to Port William every Saturday night and used the money she made to buy groceries and to pay on their debts.
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Song (4)
Within the circles of our lives we dance the circles of the years, the circles of the seasons within the circles of the years, the cycles of the moon. within the circles of the seasons, the circles of our reasons within the cycles of the moon. Again, again we come and go, changed, changing. Hands join, unjoin in love and fear, grief and joy. The circles turn, each giving into each, into all. Only music keeps us here,
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each by all the others held. In the hold of hands and eyes we turn in pairs, that joining joining each to all again. And then we turn aside, alone, out of the sunlight gone into the darker circles of return.
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Other Publications of Wendell Berry Fiction
Poetry
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, Née Quinch, 1994 The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986 A World Lost, 1996
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 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: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977 What Are People For?, 1990 33
Bibliography
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 designed and set by Daniel Raggs III in the Communication Design program at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Vector-based images and type were created using Adobe Illustrator. Content is from works cited in Bibliography. 2013