i am free We nde l l Be r r y
wendell berry: people, land, and fidelity M. A. Grubbs University of Kentucky 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. In a commencement address delivered in June 1989 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Berry gave some advice that to most modern graduates would sound old fashioned, indeed backward. But the advice he gave was timeless, and his reminder seems apocalyptic in view of the world’s current environmental crisis and, as Berry sees it, America’s cultural crisis. In a sense, Berry’s deliverance of such a critical message parallels Moses’ deliverance of the Ten Commandments, for Berry’s advice is also a prescription for cultural healing through the imposition of a set of laws. The laws Berry delivers, however, seem to be Nature’s laws. He closed his address (later
published in Harper’s as “The Futility of Global Thinking”) with a series of ten commands, which, he said, “is simply my hope for us all” (22). Viewed in the context of Berry’s canon, this sequence represents far more than a neo–romantic or agrarian appeal to return to “simplicity.” To think of his advice in this way is to misinterpret it, for it is more of an oracular warning; either rethink our attitudes toward each other and the natural world, Berry implores, or continue on a path toward natural–, cultural–, and self–annihilation.
In “People, Land, and Community,� an essay in Standing by Words, Berry speaks of the analogy between an interweaving dance and the traditional community. While elucidating this metaphor for cultural and natural harmony, he brings together his cyclic ideas of traditional work, apprenticeship, and the dead as an intricate part of the living. People at work in communities three generations old would know that their bodies renewed, time and again, the movements of other bodies, living and dead, known and loved, remembered and loved, in the same shops,
houses, and fields. That, of course, is a kind of community dance. And such a dance is perhaps the best way we have to describe harmony (79). Berry uses the dance metaphor throughout his poetry to describe harmony between humans and nature, between the living and the dead of a community, and between members of the living. The music accompanying the dancers is sometimes the music of the spheres (the notes of which are so drawn out they can be heard only over years, decades, even centuries.) Other sources of the music are farmers working or whistling a work song in a field, people working together harmoniously in communities, water running in a stream, and rain.
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.
sleep I love to lie down weary under the stalk of sleep growing slowly out of my head, the dark leaves
meshing.
“This is a plea for
humility”
An excerpt from
local knowledge in the age of information As farmers never tire of repeating, you can’t learn to farm by reading a book, and you can’t tell so me body how to farm. Older farmers I knew used to be fond of saying, “I can’t tell you how to do that, but I can put you where you can learn.” There is such a thing, then as in communicable knowledge, knowledge that comes only by experience and by association. There is in addition for us humans, always, the unknown, things perhaps that we need to know that we do not know and are never going to know. There is mystery. Obvious as it is, we easily forget that beyond our sciences and our arts, beyond our technology and our language, is the irreducible reality of our precious world that somehow, so
far, has withstood our demands and accommodated our life, and of which we will always be dangerously ignorant. Our great modern powers of science, technology, and industry are always offering themselves to us with the suggestion that we know enough to use them well, that we are intelligent enough to act without limit in our own behalf. But the evidence is now rapidly mounting against us. By living as we do, in our ignorance and our pride, we are diminishing our world and the possibility of life. This is a plea for humility.
march 22, 1968 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.
“We began to wonder if there was a light to see” An excerpt from
are you alright? 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. Around us we could feel the year coming, as strong and wide and irresistible as a wind. So if our walk had the feeling of a ramble, it was not one. We were going as straight to the Rowanberrys’ house as the water and the lay of the land would allow. After a while we began to expect to see a light. And then we began to wonder if there was a light to see. Elton stopped. “I thought we’d have seen their light by now.” I said, “They’re probably asleep.”
Those were the first words we had spoken since we left the truck. After so long, in so much quiet, our voices sounded small. Elton went on among the trees and the shadows, and I followed him. We climbed over a little shoulder of the slope then and saw one window shining. It was the light of an oil lamp, so their electricity was out, too. “And now we’re found,” Elton said. He sang it, just that much of the old hymn, almost in a whisper. We went through a little more of the woods and climbed the fence into the Rowanberrys’ hill pasture. We could see their
big barn standing up black now against the moonlight on the other side of the road, which was on high ground at that place, clear of the backwater. When we were on the gravel we could hear our steps. We walked side by side, Elton in one wheel track, I in the other, until the road went under the water again. We were as close to the house then as we could get without a boat. We stopped and considered the distance. “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew–wet red berries in a cup.” “I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
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.
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 lie awake and turn ‘ and look into the
dark.
I think of a luxury in the sturdiness and grace of necessary things, not 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.
selected works Fiction Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992 Hannah Coulter, 2004 Jayber Crow, 2000 The Memory of Old Jack, 1974
Poetry
Nathan Coulter, 1960
The Broken Ground, 1964
A Place on Earth, 1967
Clearing, 1977
Remembering, 1988
Collected Poems: 1951–1982, 1982
That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004
The Country of Marriage, 1973
Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet–Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994
Farming: A Hand Book, 1970
The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986
A Part, 1980
A World Lost, 1996
Sayings and Doings, 1975
Entries, 1994 Given: New Poems, 2005 Openings, 1968 Sabbaths: Poems, 1987 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
“I come into the peace
of wild things
who do not tax their lives
with forethought of grief...
For a time I rest in the
grace of the world,
and am free.�
bibliography Berry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. (CH) New York: Harcourt, 1972. “The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16–22. (Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?) The Long–Legged House. (LLH) New York: Harcourt, 1969. Standing by Words. (SBW) San Francisco: North Point, 1983. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986. 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. Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and Myth Again.” The Southern Review 20 (1984): 958–68. Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9–14.
This book was made in the Fall of 2013 by Julia Kent for Typography II at Washington University in St. Louis. It includes a selection of poems, an essay, and a story by author, Wendell Berry. All images were found on Flickr. This book is bound french fold with a Japanese stab bound. All type in the book is set in varying weights of Centaur.