A Collection of Works
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.
Excerpt From:
A Jonquil for
Mary Penn
It was a different world, a new world to her, that she came into then— a world of
...Here, in this new world, neighbors were always working together. “Many hands make light work,� Uncle Isham Quail loved to say, though his own old hands were no longer able to work much. Some work only the men did together, like haying and harvesting the corn. Some work only the women did together: sewing or quilting or wallpapering or housecleaning; and whenever the men were together working, the women would be together cooking. Some work the men and women did together: harvesting tobacco or killing hogs or any other job that needed many hands.
It was an old community, they all had worked together a long time. They all knew what each one was good at. When they worked together, not much needed to be explained. When they went down to the little weatherboarded church at Goforth on Sunday morning, they were glad to see one another and had much to say, though they had seen each other almost daily during the week.
This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and took them in with a warmth that answered her parents’ rejection. The men, without asking or being asked, included Elton in whatever they were doing. They told him when and where they needed him. They came to him when he needed them... Mary, who had more to learn than Elton, became a daughter to every woman in the community. She came knowing little, barely enough to begin, and they taught her much... They were only in their late thirties or early forties, but to Mary they seemed to belong to the ageless, eternal generation of mothers, unimaginably older and more experienced than herself. She called them Miss Josie, Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma. They warmed and sheltered her. Sometimes she could just have tossed herself at them like a little girl to be hugged. They were only in their late thirties or early forties, but to Mary they seemed to belong to the ageless, eternal generation of mothers, unimaginably older and more experienced than herself. She called them Miss Josie, Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma. They warmed and sheltered her. Sometimes she could just have tossed herself at them like a little girl to be hugged.
On their way home from picking blackberries one afternoon, they had to get through a new barbed wire fence. Josie Tom held two wires apart while the other four gathered their skirts, leaned down, and straddled through. Josie Tom handed their filled buckets over. And then Josie Braymer held the wires apart, and Josie Tom, stooping through, got the back of her dress hung on the top wire.
“I knew it ! �
she said, and she began to laugh. They all laughed, and nobody laughed more than Josie Tom, who was standing spraddled and stooped, helpless to move without tearing her dress.
And there on the ridgetop in the low sunlight they danced the dance of women laughing, bending and straightening, raising and lowering their hands, swaying and stepping with their heads back.
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.
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 ofengines 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!
Excerpt From:
Local Knowledge in the age of
Information From The Way of Ignorance
Communication is not necessarily cooperative. “Get big or get out� is a communication, and hardly expectant of a reply. But conversation is necessarily cooperative, and it can carry us, far beyond the principle of competition, to an understanding of
By conversation a university or a city and its region could define themselves as one community rather than an assortment of competing interests.
Center and periphery, city and country, consumers and producers do not have to define themselves as economic adversaries. They can begin to be a community simply by asking:
Once the conversation has started, it will quickly become obvious, I think, that there must be a common, agreed-upon standard of judgment; and I think this will have to be health: the health of ecosystems and of human communities.
To know the inhabiting reasons of trees and streams, old men who shed their lives on the world like leaves, I watch them go. And I go. I build the place of my leaving. The days arc into vision like fish leaping, their shining caught in the stream. I watch them go in homage and sorrow. I build the place of my dream. I build the place of my leaving that the dark may come clean.
for Guy Davenport
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, 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 ofthe sunlight gone into the darker circles of return.
Published Works of wendell berry
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
Poetry
Fiction
The Broken Ground, 1964
Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992
Clearing, 1977
Hannah Coulter, 2004
Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982
Jayber Crow, 2000
The Country of Marriage, 1973
The Memory of Old Jack, 1974
Entries, 1994
Nathan Coulter, 1960
Farming: A Hand Book, 1970
A Place on Earth, 1967
Given: New Poems, 2005
Remembering, 1988
Openings, 1968
That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004
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
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
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
“Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky in 1956 and continued on to complete a master’s degree in 1957. In 1958, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Berry has taught at Stanford University, Georgetown College, New York University, the University of Cincinnati, and Bucknell University. He taught at his alma mater, the University of Kentucky from 1964-77, and again from 1987-93. He lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky.” wendellberrybooks.com
This book was designed, built and illustrated by Christine Bosch for Typography II at Washington University in St. Louis. 2015