The Real Ideal

I first encountered the work of Wendell Berry circa 2008, as a book club my wife Emily and I had started with some friends read his collection of essays titled Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community. All four of those sounded pretty good to me. Our group had been aspirationally named “The Albina Literary Society” after a trendy Portland, Oregon neighborhood that none of us exactly lived in per se, but which we all thought was cool enough for us to one day inhabit. This fact (the name, I mean) highlights a certain type of fresh-faced, youthful simplicity that I look back on now with nostalgia.

Though I had grown up in the very mixed bag that is rural Oregon, life at that point looked more like an early episode of Portlandia. We had a small bread co-op with friends (we’ll bake homemade loaves this week, you do it next week). Pickles were made and swapped at little bartering events. Commutes, often soggy, were made by bicycle. Corporate deodorants were replaced by dustings of baking soda, applied with old makeup brushes (this was surprisingly effective). Blogs, Nokia bricks, local farmer’s markets. We knew how the world ought to be, and we were ready to help it get there as quickly as possible.

Into this halcyon hour of my young adulthood, it was reassuring for me to learn that Wendell Berry had also figured things out. He was a self-proclaimed “Mad Farmer,” and I was here for it. I was glad to hear him state what I considered to be the obvious: that modern life did not represent “progress,” that the local and the traditional represented very fragile goods that had to be actively defended, and that a good life was inextricable from our connections to place and the whole fabric of lives (human, animal, and vegetable) that bound all together. He was eloquent, he was engaged, he did not map easily on a conservative/liberal spectrum. He was an expression of true American wisdom. He had, I thought, figured things out just like me. Lucky guy.

Subsequent years grew me up. What I thought then was solid realism I know now to be a sweet idealism. Don’t get me wrong—I believe more than ever that there is a better way to live than modern consumer culture, and I strive to live (imperfectly) according to that belief. But with the years came wonderful intrusions of hard reality upon my inadvertent hubris: three children; various griefs, joys, and losses; difficult dilemmas of career; personal and professional frustration; jagged edges of friendship that left their marks and scars; exhaustion; failures of various and mostly honest kinds. Years passed, and did what years are meant to do. It was not enough to merely hold the right opinions, and my choice of deodorant felt less radical than it once had. During this time, Wendell was present as a vague force that gave context to these blessed intrusions. While I did not enjoy my attempt to read Jayber Crow (a fault of my own, I am sure), his essays and his poems, particularly his Sabbath Poems, communicated something honest, stable, and direct. He became, in a somewhat unusual way, a living man who both showed and told a way of being that I wanted—a way of being that was more capacious than youthful idealism. His world was large, large enough for me to grow into.

In May of 2021, I wrote to Wendell at his Port Royal P.O. Box. A lot had happened since my Portlandia days. I was working in corporate publishing, with a variety of feelings about what it was that I did, and how I had to do it. I had been thinking for some time about his 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, titled “It All Turns on Affection,” and it was bothering me a good deal. Over the years, Emily and I had been blessed to shape a life that we loved very much, a rich life of firewood, books, and barefoot children. But I felt a weight, an encroachment that was, stupidly, tempering my joy. I was not living up to my ideals of what my life ought to look like, and I found myself almost daily feeling like a man walking with his shoes on the wrong feet.

I asked Wendell what was to be done if the exercise of one’s work required the use of tools that were alien (or worse, actually corrosive) to the affection that he insisted was core to human economic and environmental relationships. I was genuinely somewhat messed up about it. What, I wondered, would he say I should do in the delicate balance of the ideal and the real? Having heard he had eschewed the personal computer (via a 1987 essay in Harper’s), I did not want to be a stumbling block, and so I typed my missive on my 1940 Remington Rand. What was I to do, I wondered to Wendell, if the conditions of my necessary affection were retreating—if indeed, I found myself, against my will, occasionally complicit in forcing this retreat?

His response came to me in a two-page printed letter. An excerpt:

…as we both know, our time attaches our lives to many things that are made without affection or beauty, and are therefore violent and ugly. Within the intimate boundaries of our own lives and dwelling places, as we also know, we can grant a certain presence and life to beauty and affection. But our economic life, and this is true of us all, attaches us to all sorts of things that are wrong. I don’t think we have within our reach or within the scope of reality a large solution to this problem. All we can do, I think, is to keep our minds as clear as possible about what the problem is and what the right standards of work are. …

The point, I suppose, is that if our minds are adequately informed and clear and if we have the proper standards of judgment, then when the opportunity comes to make even a small difference, we will be ready.

We will be ready. It rang very true, and was so kind. Wendell’s letter had an unusual leverage in my mind. I was able to accept what he was saying. While it did not remove many feelings of confusion and frustration, it gave me something to do. It meaningfully set my course of understanding what the true work within my work was and gave me an approach to grow into that work. It was years later that I wondered if the form of that letter—typed, I had to assume, on a computer, was intentional. (A later letter I received from him in 2023 was handwritten on yellow paper). Perhaps he was showing me that even Wendell Berry occasionally could not quite be Wendell Berry. This, to me, is inexpressibly encouraging.

Wendell is that American thinker who, for me, represents the true wisdom of a sacred and infuriating intersection: the crossroads where Real and Ideal meet. Both had their place for Wendell. Both were vital in the literal sense—a locus of vitality; of life. Wendell moved between worlds and ways of being, and faithfully so, at least in my limited estimation. In that moving, he helped show me how it looks to work for real goods under conditions that are less than ideal.

I did not know him intimately. But Wendell Berry has affected and shaped me intimately. His example and generosity of a personal word at a moment of some confusion helped me very much. It helped me better understand how to navigate maturely a society whose potential is tremendous, both for abundance and for desolation. It helped me understand my own limitations, which are omnipresent and often dire. His worldview was antithetical to both naivety and cynicism, and represented, I saw, an invitation. I might not be changing the world to match my ideal. But I might make that “small difference” real. In fact, I think today that I have rediscovered no small measure of my youthful idealism, believing more than ever that there is, truly, a better way to live than that afforded by our dominant culture, a way that may be daily and practically present to us, as the fruit of infinite “small differences.”

In this, I wish to maturely imitate our dear “Mad Farmer,” and to live, in my own place and with my own people, in the light of his glorious and uniquely American insanity. That ideal, I choose to believe, is very real indeed and is an invitation that I believe Wendell has generously and humbly extended to us all.