Wendell Berry
A Collection Of Warnings
Wendell Berry is a man of letters, an academic, cultural and economic critic, and a farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is also an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012.
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is
our only legitimate hope of survival.
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 of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale. 4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-sclae and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour. 5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
Love this miraculous world
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6. Put the interest of the community first. 7. Love your neighbors—not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have. 8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us. 9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household—which thrive by care and generosity—and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage. 10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
Late in the night I pay the unrest I owe 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, one with the earth again, and let the world go.
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
As spring begins the river rises, filling like the sorrow of nations—
uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains, the debris of kitchens all passing seaward. At dawn snow began to fall. The ducks, moving north, pass like shadows through the falling white. The jonquils, half open, bend down with its weight. The plow freezes in the furrow. In the night I lay awake, thinking of the river rising, the spring heavy with official meaningless deaths.
To moralize the state, they drag out a man, and bind his
Weary, we lie awake in the agony of the old giving birth to
hands, and darken his eyes with a black rag to be free of the
the new without assurance that the new will be better. I look
light in them, and tie him to a post, and kill him. And I am
at my son, whose eyes are like a young god's, they are so
sickened by complicity in my race. To kill in hot savagery
open to the world. I look at my sloping fields now turning
like a beast is understandable. It is forgivable and curable.
green with the young grass of April.
the sun with hope, or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.
What m
The morning's news drives sleep out of the head at night.
to die rather than enter into the design of man's hate. I
Uselessness and horror hold the eyes open to the dark.
will purge my mind of the airy claims of church and state.
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
I think I must put on a deathlier knowledge, and prepare
I will ser 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 summers garden continues its descent through me, toward the ground.
must I do to go free?
rve the earth
We are de our count
estroying try
—I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing
can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression
to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide
can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a
to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the
town or city, and they routinely do so.
destruction, that will not be because we have no other
We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our
choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable,
own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful
except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and
Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if
agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of
the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very
energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and
long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security
our lands people.
if we dont uphold the health of the land and the people and
If we continue to be economically dependent on destroying
the peoples work.
parts of the Earth, then eventually we will destroy it all.
It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly. Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it
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 the 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 tribesmen 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!
Works
The Futility of Global Thinking
This book was created by Julie Safferstein in the Spring of
Awake At Night
2013 for the class Typography II as part of the Communication
February 2, 1968
Design major in the Sam Fox School of Design & Art at
March 22, 1968
Washington University in St. Louis. The typefaces used
The Mornings News
were Univers 65 Bold and Adobe Ming Std. The images
Compromise, Hell!
were sourced from various printed books.
The Silence