Berry’s work is an ongoing exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land, and his writing constitutes, as Gary Tolliver has said, one man’s “continuing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of 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.
His memories lived in the place like fingers locked in the rock ledges like roots. When he died and his influence entered the air I said, Let my mind be the earth of his thought, let his kindness go ahead of me. Though I do not escape the history barbed in my flesh, certain wise movements of his hands, the turns of his speech keep with me. His hope of peace keeps with me in harsh days, the shell of his breath dimming away three summers in the earth.
The Rowanberrys were Elton’s friends, and
his own place in the presence of his own work.
because they were his, they were mine. Elton
If he rested there, first he would begin to think
had known them ever since he was just a little
about what he had to do, and then he would
half-orphan boy, living with his mother and old-
begin to do it.
er 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.
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
Elton worked hard and worried hard, and he
and Mart batched there together after their
was often in need of rest. But he had a restless
mother died, and in spite of the electric lights
mind, which meant that he could not rest on
and telephone and a few machines, they lived
a life that would have been recognizable to
don’t hardly seem right to disappoint ‘em.”
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
Mart was the one Elton liked best to work with. Mart was not only a fine hand but had a gift for accommodating himself to the rhythms and ways of his partner. “He can think your thoughts,” Elton said. Between the two of them was a sympathy of body and mind that they had worked out and that they trusted with an unshaken, unspoken trust. And so Elton was always at ease and quiet in Mart’s company when they were at rest.
ART HAD A COMPOUND MIND, AS A DAISY HAS A COMPOUND FLOWER, AND HIS MIND HAD SOMETHING OF THE UNWARY COMELINESS OF A DAISY.
Art was the rememberer. He knew what he knew and what had been known by a lot of dead kinfolks and neighbors. They lived on in his mind and spoke there, reminding him and us of things that needed to be remembered. Something that happened would remind him of something that he remembered, which would remind him of something that his grandfather remembered. It was not that he “lived in his mind.� He lived in the place, but the place was where the memories were, and he walked among them, tracing them out over the living ground.
THAT WAS WHY WE LOVED HIM. We followed the state road along the ridges toward Port William and then at the edge of town turned down the Sand Ripple Road. 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 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. “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 HOHOOAW!” “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.
The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness of the grass, fathomless, the long blades rising out of the well of time. Cars travel the valley roads below me, their lights finding the dark, and racing on. Above their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard, and felt the country turn under the stars toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here between the bright silent thousands of stars and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground. The hill has grown to me like a foot. Until I lift the earth I cannot move.
Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes-the farms and ranches and working forests-and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong.
AND SO WE COMPROMISE BY AGREEING TO PERMIT THE DESTRUCTION ONLY OF PARTS OF THE 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 a complaint 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 BY DESTROYING THE SOURCES OF THEIR LIFE. PEOPLE CAN CHANGE; THEY CAN LEARN TO DO BETTER.
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 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?
I love to lie down weary under the stalk of sleep growing slowly out of my head, the dark leaves meshing.
FICTION 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, NĂŠe Quinch, 1994 The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986 A World Lost, 1996
ESSAYS Another Turn of the Crank, 1996 The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002 Citizenship Papers, 2003
POETRY
A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural &
The Broken Ground, 1964
The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural &
Clearing, 1977
Agricultural, 1981
Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990
The Country of Marriage, 1973
The Hidden Wound, 1970
Entries, 1994
Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987
Farming: A Hand Book, 1970
Life Is a Miracle, 2000
Given: New Poems, 2005
The Long-Legged House, 2004
Openings, 1968
Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981
A Part, 1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992
Sabbaths: Poems, 1987
Standing by Words, 1983
Sayings and Doings, 1975
The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999
Gorge, 1971
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agricul-
1997, 1998
ture, 1977
The Wheel, 1982
What Are People For?, 1990
Agricultural, 1972
Berry, Wendell. Fidelity: Five Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992 Berry, Wendell. The Collected Poems, 19571082. New York: North Point. 1985 Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkley: Counterpoint 2005.
Designed by Monika Pawar for Typography II at Washington University in St. Louis. Text is set in Century Gothic.