wendell berry
selected works
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. Berry’s work is an ongoing exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land, and his writing constitutes, one man’s search for harmony with the natural world. To proponents of modern progress, Berry’s ideas must seem regressive, unrealistic, radical. But no advice could be more needed and more practical, if we are to progress. Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching, his home and family, and all that each involves are extraordinarily integrated. The traditional community is one of Berry’s central metaphors for cultural and natural harmony. Such a community is a highly intricate alliance in which individuals function as parts of a membership, each depending on and affecting all the others. The traditional community, like the traditional farms within it, is a model of interdependency.
“ The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.�
are you alright The spring work had started, and I needed a long night’s rest, or that was my opinion, and I was about to go to bed, but then the telephone rang. It was Elton. He had been getting ready for bed, too, I think, and it had occurred to him then that he was worried. “Andy, when did you see the Rowanberrys?” I knew what he had on his mind. The river was in flood. The backwater was over the bottoms, and Art and Mart would not be able to get out except by boat or on foot. “Not since the river came up.” “Well, neither have I. And their phone’s out. Mary, when did Mart call up here?” I heard Mary telling him, “Monday night,” and then, “It was Monday night,” Elton said to me. “I’ve tried to call every day since, and I can’t get anybody. That’s four days.” “Well, surely they’re all right.” “Well, that’s what Mary and I have been saying. Surely they are. They’ve been taking care of themselves a long time. But, then, you never know.” “The thing is, we don’t know.” We knew what we were doing, and both of us were a little embarrassed about it. The Rowanberry Place had carried that name since the first deeds were recorded in the log cabin that was the first courthouse at Hargrave. Rowanberrys had been taking care of themselves there for the better part of two hundred years. We knew that Arthur and Martin Rowanberry required as little worrying about as anybody alive. But now, in venturing to worry about them, we had put them, so to speak, under the sign of mortality. They were, after all, the last of the Rowanberrys, and they were getting old. It caused us to think of things that could happen.
We were uneasy in being divided from them by the risen water and out of touch.
Elton said, “It’s not hard, you know, to think of things that could happen.” “Well,” I said, “do you think we’d better go see about them?”
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.
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. 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. 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. 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 out vote or out ”contribute” the periphery. But above all, now, as a sort of center of centers, is the global “freemarket” economy of the great corporations, the periphery of which is everywhere, and for its periphery this center expresses no concern and acknowledges no responsibility.
The global economy is a development–it is intended apparently as the culmination–of the technological and commercial colonialist orthodoxy that has dominated the world increasingly since the Renaissance, the principle of the orthodoxy being that any commercial entity is entitled to wealth according to its power. A center, then, as I will use the term, is wherever the wealth, power, and knowledge of this overbearing economy have accumulated. Modern technology, as it has developed from oceanic navigation to the World Wide Web, has been increasingly a centralizing force, enabling ever larger accumulations of wealth, power, and knowledge in an ever smaller number of centers. 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. 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 economybased on information is a fantasy. 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.
The Rowanberrys were Elton’s friends, and because they were his, they were mine. Elton had known them ever since he was just a little half-orphan boy, living with his mother and older brothers on the next farm up the creek. He had got a lot of his raising by being underfoot and in the way at the Rowanberrys’. And in the time of his manhood, the Rowanberry Place had been one of his resting places. Elton worked hard and worried hard, and he was often in need of rest. But he had a restless mind, which meant that he could not rest on his own place in the presence of his own work. If he rested there, first he would begin to think about what he had to do, and then he would begin to do it. To rest, he needed to be in somebody else’s place. We spent a lot of Sunday afternoons down at the Rowanberrys’, on the porch looking out into the little valley in the summertime, inside by the stove if it was winter. Art and Mart batched there together after their mother died, and in spite of the electric lights and telephone and a few machines, they lived a life that would have been recognizable to Elias Rowanberry, who had marked his X in the county’s first deed book–a life that involved hunting and fishing and foraging as conventionally as it involved farming. They practiced an old–fashioned independence, an old–fashioned generosity, and an old– fashioned fidelity to their word and their friends. And they were hound men of the old correct school. They would not let a dog tree anywhere in earshot, day or night, workday or Sunday, without going to him. “It can be a nuisance,” Art said, “but it don’t hardly seem right to disappoint ‘em.”
We followed the state road along the ridges toward port william and then at the edge of town turned down the sand ripple road.
the man born to farming The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?
We went down the hill through the woods, and as we came near the floor of the valley, Elton went more carefully and we began to watch. We crossed a little board culvert that rattled under the wheels, eased around a bend, and there was the backwater, the headlights glancing off it into the treetops, the road disappearing into it. 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.
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. Around us we could feel the year coming, as strong and wide and irresistible as a wind.
sowing In the stilled place that once was a road going down from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew
a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders, and the deeds oftheir lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle and then the fire overgrew it all, i walk heavy with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between
history’s death upon the place and the trees that would have come
I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.
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. 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 selfdetermination. 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. Far from caring for our land and our rural people, as we would do if we understood our dependence on them, we have not, as a nation, given them so much as a serious thought for half a century. I read, I believe, my full share of commentary on politics and economics by accredited experts, and I can assure you that you will rarely find in any of them even a passing reference to agriculture or forestry. Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an actual country lies out there beyond the places of power, wealth, and knowledge.The ultimate official word on agriculture seems to have been spoken by Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, who told the farmers to
“Get big or get out.”
The assumption that science can serve as an adequate connector between people and land, and thus can effectively replace the common knowledge and culture of local farm communities, by now has the status of an official program –though the aim of science, more often than not, is to connect capital with profit. The ascendancy of the expert involves a withdrawal or relinquishment ofconfidence in local intelligence–that is, in the knowledge, experience, and mental competence of ordinary people doing ordinary work. The result, naturally, is that the competence of local intelligence has declined. We are losing the use of local minds at work on local problems. The right way to deal with a problem, supposedly, is to summon an expert from government, industry, or a university, who will recommend the newest centrally-devised mechanical or chemical solution. Thus capital supposedly replaces intelligence as the basis of work, just as information supposedly replaces land as the basis of the economy. This would be fine, of course, if the recommended solutions were in fact solving the problems. But too often they not only fail to solve the problems, but either make them worse or replace them with new problems. And so, as we continue our enterprise of “sound science” and technological progress, our agriculture becomes more and more toxic, specialized, and impoverished of genes, breeds, and varieties; we deplete the aquifers and the rivers; our rural communities die; our fields and our food become less healthful; our food supply becomes ever more dependent on long–distance transportation and immigrant labor; our water becomes less drinkable; the hypoxic zone grows in the Gulf of Mexico. These calamities of industrial agriculture define our need to take seriously Wes Jackson’s insistence that we need a farm population large, alert, and skilled enough, not just to make the land produce, but to take the best possible care of it as well. At present we are so far from this goal that a number of depopulated rural communities in the prairie states are offering free land and other economic incentives to new settlers.
winter night poem for mary As I started home after dark
I looked into the sky and saw the new moon, an old man with a basket on his arm.
He walked among the cedars in the bare woods.
They stood like guardians, dark as he passed. He might have been singing, or he might not. He might have been sowing the spring flowers, or he might not. But i saw him
with his basket, going along the hilltop.
That the center at present is ignorantly dependent on the periphery does not suggest that the center is somehow inherently worthless. It is not.
The periphery needs a center, just as a center needs a periphery. one is unthinkable without the other. The center collects and stores things of value. It is a place of economic and cultural exchange. It is the right place for a stockyard or a university. The distinction I am working toward is that between an ignorant center and one that is properly knowledgeable, and also that between an ignorant periphery and one that is properly knowledgeable. The critical point is that to be properly knowledgeable each must be in conversation with the other. They must know the truth of their interdependence; they must know what they owe to each other. Once we have proposed a conversation between center and periphery, we see immediately that what the periphery has to say to the center is critically different from what the center has to say, or at least from what it presently is saying, to the periphery.
in this world The hill pasture, an open place among the trees, tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill dark floodwater moves down the river. The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
i have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside, letting the day gather and pass. Below me cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands, slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world men are making plans, wearing themselves out, spending their lives, in order to kill each other.
But we were thinking, too, of the Rowanberrys. That we were in a mood to loiter and did not loiter would have reminded us of them, if we had needed reminding. To go to their house, with the water up, would have required a long walk from any place we could have started. We were taking the shortest way, which left us with the problem that it was going to be a little too short. The best we could do, this way, would be to come down the valley until we would be across from the house but still divided from it by a quarter mile or more of backwater. We could call to them from there. But what if we got no answer? What if the answer was trouble? Well, they had a boat over there. If they needed us, one of them could set us over in the boat. But what if we got no answer? What if, to put the best construction upon silence, they could not hear us? Well, we could only go as near as we could get and call. 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.”
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. And then Elton cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Ohhhhh, Mart! Ohhhhh, Art!” We waited, it seemed, while Art had time to say, “Did you hear somebody?” and Mart to answer, “Well, I thought so.” We saw light come to another window, as somebody picked up a lamp and opened the hall door. We heard the front door open.
And then art’s voice came across the water:
“yeeeaaah?” And Elton called back, “Are you aaallI riiight?” I knew they were. They were all right, and we were free to go back through the woods and home to sleep.
The information that is accumulated at the center – at the corporate or academic or governmental end of the information economy – and then dispersed to the periphery tends necessarily toward the abstract or universal, toward general applicability. The Holstein cow and the Roundupready soybean are, in this sense, abstractions: the artifacts of a centrally divised agriculture, in use everywhere without respect to place or to any need for local adaptation. When the periphery accepts these things uncritically adopting the ideas and the language ofthe center, then it has begun to belong to the center, and usually at a considerable long –term cost to itself. The immediate cost is the loss of knowledge and language specific to localities. But the question we are trying to raise here is: How can the best work be done? Or: How can we give the best possible care to our highly variable economic landscapes, in which no two woodlands, no two farms, and no two fields are exactly alike? If we are ever to get the right answers to this question, then the people ofthe periphery will have to cultivate and cherish knowledge of their places and communities, which are always to some extent unique. This will be placed knowledge; out of place, it is little better than ignorance; and it is learnable only at home. To speak of it will require a placed language, made in reference to local names, conditions, and needs. Moreover, the people of the center need to know that this local knowledge is a necessary knowledge of their world. They need to hear the local languages with understanding and respect–no more talk about “hicks” and “provincials” and “rednecks.” A refined, discriminating knowledge of localities by the local people is indispensable if we want the most sensitive application of intelligence to local problems, if we want the best work to be done, if we want the world to last. If we give up the old orientation of agriculture to the nature of individual farms and fields, and reorient it to industry, industrial technology, and the global economy, then the result is uniformity, oversimplification. overspecialization, and (inevitably) destruction.
list of complete works fiction
essays
Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992
Another Turn of the Crank, 1996
Hannah Coulter, 2004
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of
Jayber Crow, 2000
Wendell Berry, 2002
The Memory of Old Jack, 1974
Citizenship Papers, 2003
Nathan Coulter, 1960
A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972
A Place on Earth, 1967
The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1981
Remembering, 1988
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990
That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004
The Hidden Wound, 1970
Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994
Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987
The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986
The Long-Legged House, 2004 Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981 Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992
A World Lost, 1996
poetry 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
Life Is a Miracle, 2000
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
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
this book was edited and designed by makenzie kressin at washington university in st.louis using scala sans & bodoni in the spring of 2012 in typography ii.