In May, my seniors and I used to talk often of the necessity for containment or embodiment of memory in literature. We’d ask whether it is possible to understand such an abstract, amorphous feeling before it is made concrete and namable. Does memory—and the dissonance that arises from it—have to be contained in something like an artifact or an image or even in language itself before it can be reckoned with? So many of our books trended toward some degree of exile and the cost of remembering, but in truth, I think we arrived at this point every year because we were figuring out how to say goodbye to each other, how to preserve the memory (and significance) of four years together.
Admittedly, I taught English in a performing arts school, so much of what we discussed adopted this strange urgency: If we can get just this single passage right, if we can write this one thing clearly, we’ll have figured out people, and then we’ll know what they ought to look like off the page and in motion—and in the mirror, I suspect. That’s the trick of an intellectual life. You have to ground it in people, but people are hard. Perhaps especially the people you love the most.
I do not doubt the re-creative force of fiction: a power, Ralph Ellison insisted, that allows all the dissonance of the world to exist in one space; it doesn’t solve anything, but the very idea of letting it exist together means we can deal with it and shape it. We desire perhaps some kind of fatalistic joy that can guarantee resolution, a namable end, a definable thing. The understanding of just what one’s entire life has meant. And maybe the tension and ambiguity lie in the dissonance between such a desire and the navigating of that desire.
I don’t know.
I’d always joke and say that if I won the lottery, I’d take them all to London in the spring. We’d see all the shows at the National, I’d say. And we’d take the tour and we’d walk along South Bank and buy books and it’d be visceral and real and somehow representative of everything we were together. I’d say this and they never laughed; instead they always got sad. Why would you tell us this, Ms. Johnson. Now it’s all we want.
Instead I’d give them a book, preferably used so that the history of readership could be tactile, and I’d tell them I hope this offers you the right lesson at the right time in the right place. That you’ll see the threads of memory as they wind all the way back to this moment, contained in an object and made real.
I’m thinking of this now that I’ve digested two FPR conferences and soon a third, conferences I attend mostly to see a former professor of mine again, now as an adult ostensibly more capable of knowing him as a person and understanding lessons long ago inherited. I’m thinking of this now as FPR grieves Wendell Berry. Because grief requires memory, but memory requires a kind of possessive knowledge often at odds with community.
When I was an undergraduate at Augustana, Dr. Peters used to lament, as Berry did, the seemingly youthful inclination toward leaving home—either to seek an education or to set down roots, as it were, far from the actual soil we were raised on. He likened it to a kind of perverse intellectualism, the kind of thing people love to boast about as a matter of intellectual superiority but which itself remains an intellectually vapid pursuit. He used to say we’d all be better off going back home to tend a small farm than continuing with what passed for liberal arts education these days (“these days” being some twenty years ago now but no less familiar).
He also said, paraphrasing from an abundance of literary genius, that people who prefer cold weather are morally superior to those who prefer warm and that the Spartans, Pistons, Lions, and Tigers are all God’s teams, so…you know…do with that what you will.
But despite my attending a family school 350 miles away from where I grew up, whose liberal arts luster had faded some from the time of my grandparents, it was still Peters who introduced me to Emerson for the first time, then later Postman and Berry, never afraid to remind us that a community does not get stronger unless we individually are willing to improve ourselves first. It was he who gave me the Romantic poets and redefined imagination, who read Keats with his feet up on the desk and told us life is precious because it is short, who read Wordsworth and told us to walk in the early mornings. It was he who took one look at my first paper and asked kindly, “Why not just get to the point” and crossed out the first two pages. And it was he who challenged the very assumptions I had about academic hypocrisy. His Bar Jester antics aside, he didn’t just preach, you see; he practiced. If he told us we might do better in this world to build with our hands and not machines, or walk to work instead of drive, it was only because he did these things himself and knew their worth. It was he who said, in homage to his own great teacher, “You don’t get to judge this book. This book judges you.” And it was he who taught us the etymological distinction between apology and its more modern turn toward shared grief.
I don’t mean to feed the ego of a man who, on the first day I ever met him, greeted the class by saying, “I just finished writing a story. It’s a good one. I’m going to read it to you now.” I mean only to say there’s a reason a fairly liberal public high school teacher from Minnesota drove 600 miles to an event in Michigan where she was likely the only person in the room voting for Tim Walz a third time, why she flew to Waco, Texas, and walked around the Dr. Pepper Museum, and why she’ll fly to Indianapolis to hear people speak on neighborly arts, certainly, but on Wendell Berry most definitely. I am an ‘itinerant vandal’ as Peters once condemned, having spent most of my life split between two states, so the travel itself wasn’t the issue, but there must have been some moment of exquisite clarity that first summer in which I realized I had too long been avoiding the act of “placing” those people who are most important to me within the context of their world and not my own.
And yet, because of my memories, the first thought I had when an Augustana friend texted me the news of Berry’s passing, was how inadequate the phrase “I’m sorry for your loss” would be for the man who gave me my first Berry essay. Such an expression denotes a shared understanding of sadness, and certainly there is some of that—I read Berry with my students, too, after all— but it would be more appropriate to say, “I apologize for your loss.” It is unique to you, shaped by your memories, abstracted and then made concrete in ways I am not privy to. I defend that possessive grief even when the man you’ve lost is so widely beloved.
My grandmother is ninety; she is my last living grandparent, and when she passes, I will be relentless in my possession, even while I know my grief is shared. My best friend has terminal colon cancer, and I know we will lose him before his children are ready. He has an entire mountain of support and a world I cannot possibly have seen all of, and still, I will grieve him possessively as though I am the only person who knows him. Not because I am but because my grief must be placed before I can honor it and before I can share it.
I never had the privilege of meeting Wendell Berry, so all I know about him has been learned through Peters, through FPR, and through Berry’s own writing. But here’s the thing: Peters wrote me a letter once when I first started teaching, reminding me that something I would do or say might one day help a student in a dark hour…so do or say it— and I keep that letter in a copy of Wendell Berry: Life and Work on a bookshelf decorated with photos of students and family. Abstract made concrete.
So, JP, I apologize for your loss. With all my heart.
But it’s basketball season now, so check your ego.
