When the news that Wendell Berry had died showed up on one of the screens that keep me informed of such things, my first thought was not that a man had passed on, but that a whole world was gone. The world that had Wendell Berry in it was its own country. Now that world is the past, foreign to the present. Now we live in a new country, not yet discovered.
That’s how it always feels when a loved one dies. The world that had my grandpa in it was different from the world I live in now. But I knew my grandpa. It’s rare to feel this way about someone you never met. At least for me it’s rare. I’m the kind that scoffs when crowds turn out to cry en masse for dead celebrities. I imagine Berry might have said something wise about how that’s what happens when our affections get hijacked by abstractions. But there’s a crowd of readers shedding real tears for Berry right now, and while many of us may have talked with him once or twice on that front porch in Port Royal, most of us didn’t, and none of us were his grandkids. So why does it feel like we were?
The other day I was talking about Berry with a colleague at my institution’s seminary, and I think she put her finger on it. She said Berry shows her what it means to simply tell the truth with your words. Most writers are telling you something else, either in place of or in addition to the truth. They’re telling you how clever they are, or they’re hedging and hemming and hawing because they don’t exactly know what they want to say; all they really want is to say something and watch people listen to them. But when you read Berry, there’s no screen. There’s craft, definitely. Such craft. He’s not following his bliss and blathering about whatever comes to mind. It’s the furthest thing from “autowriting.” But—and here she hesitated—there’s something like the Holy Spirit in Berry’s words. It’s just not about him.
And that, somehow, is why he can feel like your grandpa. He’s not a celebrity. He’s a member of your community, and the community is bigger than him (or you). But he, more than most, showed the rest of us what it’s like to choose membership over celebrity. That’s why he had such a place within so many communities, and that’s why his death feels so personal. There’s nothing paradoxical or ironic about that. It’s just how it works. It’s the difference between the great soul that’s great because it’s brimful of something greater, and the big personality that’s big because it’s puffed up like a balloon. You can feel a kinship with the one, even at a distance, because he calls you upward and onward. You can only idolize the other, and pretend to feel something when the balloon pops.
I think part of the reason Berry’s death feels to me like “a world lost” is that the world we live in now is so full of hot air, and without him it feels emptier than ever. Nostalgia for “a better time” hit me hard within minutes of hearing about his death. Since then I’ve spent some time thinking about that feeling, and I’ve realized that it’s dead wrong. Nostalgia is what careless readers often find in Berry’s books. The headline for the New York Times’ obituary described him as a “writer who extolled America’s agrarian past.” Nobody who simply tells the truth can “extoll the past” as if the past wasn’t also full of lies. That’s just not what Berry did; he spent a lot of words articulating what was wrong in America’s past, agricultural and otherwise. Berry brought the American past to mind because it’s so foreign to the American present, and traveling in a foreign country helps you see your own more clearly. The past, for all its evils, was marred less by the hopeless presentism that mires our time in fantasies of progress. Berry didn’t traffic in nostalgia because he didn’t hold with optimism, which is just nostalgia’s mirror image. Berry held with hope, and hope springs from roots. Hope gives us the confidence to keep our eye on what’s in front of us, without needing to know what will come of what we do. Hope frees us to discover where we are now, to spend ourselves working on the world as we find it, not waiting for a better world where there’s no work to do.
The late Roger Scruton identified “oikophobia,” the fear or loathing of one’s own home place, as the spiritual sickness of our time. Scruton and Berry and many others in this tribe commended oikophilia, love of place, as the proper way of resistance to machines and institutions by which “every place [is] displaced,” flattened into a nondescript “space” that can be emptied and filled by whatever serves profit. Those of us they have persuaded have tried to cultivate love of place, and where we have done it well we have done so not by conjuring an affect of affection but by doing the work that binds us concretely to the places that give us a home. But it is very easy, even when we are doing that good work, to wish that it didn’t need to be done, that our places had never been displaced. It is easy to wish we lived in a “better time,” whether we imagine it as a mythic past or a fantastic future. We begin to fear or loathe our own era, the particular slice of history that gives us the only home in time we will ever know.
If our time is beset by oikophobia, it is also awash with what we might call chronophobia. It’s not surprising that people would come to hate the present when the present is an endless scroll. Especially when much of this scroll consists of prognostications that the end of humanity, and of the earth, is imminent. There is everything to hate about that. But there’s a subtler kind of chronophobia that can sour even those who do hate it, who reject it, who seek roots and look for hope outside the screens. Against this, Wendell Berry, perhaps more than any writer I know, calls us and frees us to love our own time. He commends chronophilia. “All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us,” as Gandalf puts it. But we can be grateful, not merely dutiful. We can love the “endlessly interesting work” that’s been put on our plate by the Machine, even though—and because—we won’t live to see it finished. “Plant sequoias,” as Berry put it. And don’t resent but revel in the fact that we live in a time when sequoias have to be planted. That’s the country we live in now, the country in which we have our membership. Only in that country’s good earth could our own souls hope to grow as great as Wendell Berry’s.
