FPR will be running several tributes to Wendell Berry in the coming days. If you’d like to chime in with your own–about a letter he sent, a time you spoke with him, a book of his that shifted your life–please do so in the comment section of the initial post.
“Love is the crisis of our work,” Wendell Berry writes in one of his poems. There’s much to be said about Berry and his writing and his legacy. He said a lot of it himself over the course of his ninety-two years. But as I reflect on his faithful witness, I keep coming back to the simple realization that he was a man “in love / alive in this mortal world.” In his friendships and writing, his farming and advocacy, he worked from a deep well of love for precious things.
“The way to love anything,” G.K. Chesterton writes, “is to realize that it may be lost.” If this applies to Berry’s love for the many goods of life, it’s particularly apt for those of us who came to love Berry’s writings and, at least in some small way, the man himself. Knowing that he and Tanya were living a sane and faithful life at Lanes Landing Farm steadied me when “despair for the world” grew in me. To borrow a phrase from his teacher Wallace Stegner, they were a landmark in my geography of hope. His absence makes it hard to go on. Yet I’m reminded of what Hannah Coulter says in reflecting on her husband Nathan’s death: “Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.” May Berry’s death be a kind of lens that clarifies the loves to which he devoted his life.
His most explicit, comprehensive statement of his credo may be this declaration in “Health is Membership”:
I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love which subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.
This belief in love’s primacy animates his fiction, where he imagines fallen humans living their wonderful, bumbling, humorous lives in the “shadowless light” cast by this divine love. It animates his poetic visions of Sabbath rest and creaturely rhythms. And it animates his essays, even at their most polemical.
It’s as an essayist, perhaps, that Berry made most of his enemies. His cultural critiques expose the manifold follies of our age with biting insight. He welcomed the label “contrarian,” and the title of one of his books even labels him a “crank.” Yet Berry is never cynical, shrill, or rigid. This is because he writes with a firm and clear love for the goods of creation. His vision of beloved goods, like Wheeler Catlett’s vision of cattle grazing on green grass, motivates and guides his writing. It really does all turn on affection for Berry, and that affection infuses even his most incisive critiques with humor and hope.
Berry relentlessly exposed a technocratic culture’s false answers to the fundamental question of what people are for. Are we machines to be optimized? Are we for pleasure, consuming our way toward the pursuit of happiness? No, we are creatures made in the image of God, and we have been given a vocation—we have good work to do in the service of love. This vision of creaturely human life judges all of us, and ideological partisans most of all. When he writes in The Unsettling of America that “the divisions issuing from the division of body and soul are first sexual and then ecological,” he offends libertine liberals and GDP-worshiping conservatives.
Berry’s voice really is unclassifiable in the way that W.H. Auden said Kierkegaard’s is:
Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has said, and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget).
And this grounded originality enabled Berry to sustain an unlikely conversation between liberal and conservative, rural and urban. As he told one interviewer, “I believe in the importance of conversation. I think our conversation is worth more right now than either one of us thinking separately.” Elsewhere he writes of his belief “that the right model or the norm of human relations is a conversation in earnest and in good faith between two people.” His imaginative sympathy enabled him to stake out hopeful possibilities and to speak across partisan divides. He was an eminently sane man in an insane time.
But today I don’t really want to think about Berry’s legacy or the significance of his public witness. His many wise words are all downstream from his wise life, generous friendship, and faithful devotion to beloved goods. I’m reminded of the final page of Jayber Crow, when Mattie sees Jayber enter her hospital room and realizes that Troy, her husband, is cutting her beloved woods while she is dying:
Her eyes filled with tears, but she said quietly, “I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.”
Then, in the loss of all the world, when I might have said the words I had so long wanted to say, I could not say them. I saw that I was not going to be able to talk without crying, and so I cried. I said, “But what about this other thing?”
She looked at me then. “Yes,” she said. She held out her hand to me. She gave me the smile that I had never seen and will not see again in this world, and it covered me all over with light.
Mattie, like Berry, dies knowing that in so many ways the beauty of the earth is being ruined, and yet this ruin does not destroy the love that sustains the world, the love that we may participate in. The one whose love sustains the world has himself gone down to death because of his great love. And because he did not stay there, love lights the way even in our loss and grief. In the last letter that Berry wrote to me, he signed off, “Even in so bad a time we have much to be thankful for.” Indeed. May our sorrow and even despair at the loss of this wonderful writer and friend be a magnanimous despair, granting us a deeper realization of the inestimable gift that his life and work have been.
