We hold the earth in common with the trees and the birds and all other creatures. It does not belong solely to humans. It is simply our home, the place the Creator has given us to grant us life and all of its virtues and responsibilities. We have to take care of our home. We cannot squander it or waste it without squandering and wasting ourselves.
I think Wendell Berry’s prime subject was economy, the system by which we live and gain our lives and maintain other lives and that requires primary resources, hope, and effort, in order to produce yields. Our first economy, as I think Wendell envisioned things, is Nature. The great lesson of Nature is continuity. Nature’s primary economy is self-preservation. Right now the oak trees are dropping their acorns, one tree may produce thousands of acorns in the fall. Some of those acorns will become saplings and eventually some of those saplings will survive and produce a great harvest of their own acorns, and the entire cycle will hopefully continue. That is what an individual oak tree is designed to do, and the acorn of today anticipates the acorns and oaks of future generations, and comes from an ancestral oak itself. I think Wendell’s stance was to see Nature in these terms, to accept a lean year or an abundant year equally, provided that continuity remains the primary function. This is true for a small farm. But the caretaking is an immense responsibility and entails all factors, from proper care for the land and water to humane treatment of the animals we raise for our food, to proper health for the families and communities who live on small farms and apply their labor and hopes and spirits to the task.
I think Wendell’s vision was to start with an individual determined to live in the world on the terms the Creator has indicated, if we see Creation for what it is and revere it and understand ourselves as caretakers. If we take care of this holy Creation, we will meet our human purpose. We will also take care of our families and our communities. We will live in the world as a fellowship, as God’s children, members one of another. If we are to live in such a manner, we will have to understand our inheritance and account for the sins of our fathers and also pick up and maintain their virtues. This will help us live with greater accord today, and it will mean we will lay a reliable foundation for future generations. Thus the continuity we observe in a single oak tree is the kind of continuity we should wish for our human lives and our human communities.
Wendell approached these matters in practical terms. He operated his farm with continuity as the purpose. He had to improve his land, because previous caretakers had damaged it, knowingly or not. He made his own errors on the way and determined to correct them, knowing it may take a generation for a damaged pasture to heal. If you have a damaged pasture you may have to face the fact that your effort is to help it heal—and you may not live to see it fully healed and thriving. That is another virtue I find in Wendell’s work and example: we must do work in our lifetime whose benefits may not arrive until long after we are gone. By this measure, the impact of a single human life reaches beyond the physical years of that life. We are capable of living on such terms—something Wendell learned from previous generations, which is a hope he brought to everything he did and wrote.
But this gets us into the unseen. We cannot see the past we come from, nor can we see the future possibilities we are trying to preserve. Yet we cannot escape the reality of such connections. If we live with this profound connection to our past and our future, then we have to face our responsibilities, and that will probably require some imagination. We can work sloppily or recklessly. We can do things on the cheap or in belligerent haste. We can waste ourselves, our resources, our time, and our spirits. We can lay waste to others in increasingly “efficient” ways. But you don’t have to be a great scholar to realize this is no way to live. We cannot forget the past nor can we throw away the future, and that knowledge ought to influence the work we do in the present, not just the quality of the work, but its purpose, which does not boil down to mere money. Yes, we can work for ourselves and our families, but if we aspire to have meaningful lives, we have to understand we are working for each other and the home we share, for our common good and welfare. For me, that is the thread of continuity in all of Wendell’s writing, that a farmer or an artist is not singular, but is a co-creator, aligned with the holy qualities of Creation, and somehow that kind of artist is animated by a moral imagination. So the continuity we see in Nature can be the same continuity that grows in our art—no spectacle, just a steadiness, the slow pace as the mind learns from and belongs to Nature. Nature is interdependent and completely integrated. We can find our lives in it, and nowhere else. The earth and Nature are God’s Creation. So are we. Such a reality, however, is not a barrier. It is, instead, a gift.
One of the many pleasures I take from all of Wendell’s writing, regardless of the genre, is the privilege of seeing his imagination at work. Early in his novel, A World Lost, Wendell presents nine-year-old Andy Catlett, who has decided against his mother’s preferences to take a lone swim in a farm pond. Here is the scene:
I turned over on my back and floated for a long time. Looked at from so near the surface of the pond, the sky was huge, the world almost nothing at all, and I apparently absent altogether. The sky seemed a great gape of vision, without the complication of so much as an eye. Now and then a butterfly or a snake doctor or a bird would fly across and I would watch it. But what really fascinated and satisfied me were the birds high up that, after you had looked into the sky a while, just appeared or were just there: a hawk soaring maybe, or a swift or a swallow darting about.
. . . I was nine years old, going on ten; having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want to be anyplace else. (pp. 11-12)
This is a brief scene in one of Wendell’s shorter—and I think most personal novels—for which the Gospel account of the Prodigal Son is the archetype. Except it’s set in rural Kentucky about the time the horrors of World War II unleash themselves upon the earth. Floating in the pond is the boy’s brief glimpse of heaven—all of the world is together and he is simply part of it. While this scene is clearly the fusion of Wendell’s memory and imagination, such moments—in life and in art—are essential to learning who we are and what we are for. We are supposed to belong to the whole and if we do not, we squander the value and purpose of our lives. And, just as the Prodigal Son comes to his senses in the pigsty, we must return to our home and our father’s love—we must live our lives within the Father’s order. Or else we’re not really living and we have lost our purpose.
Those of us who have never sought to escape the Father’s order have our ongoing responsibilities, however, chief of which is to do our part to renew and maintain that order. Here’s is Wendell’s short poem from 1968 that shows a man attempting to regain the Father’s order in the midst of a great spiritual rupture, the Viet Nam War:
February 2, 1968
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
War spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
Wendell understood that you have to start somewhere with anything one sets out to do. I took a course with him in his last year of teaching at the University of Kentucky. He called the course Pastoral Poetry, and had a liberal sense of what that entailed. We read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, part of The Faerie Queen, Wordsworth’s parable of a shepherding family, “Michael,” and Jane Austen’s Emma, among other canonical works of British literature. Wendell’s mode of instruction was simply to point out passages in the works. He’d read a handful of lines or a couple of paragraphs and simply say, “That’s good writing.” He wasn’t simply observing the writer’s skill or cleverness. He was drawing our attention to evidence of the continuity found in substantial art, just as one finds continuity in the oak tree—if one bothers to look. At the beginning of each class, Wendell asked us a single question based on our reading assignment. We were to answer the question in exactly one sentence. This was a means to get us to write beyond grammatical correctness, and to practice the deeper skills needed to write with purpose, as the first steps of our own efforts to write with our own grasp of continuity. Very often Wendell would read our one-sentence replies and twist his face in disapproval. One day, exasperated, he simply said, “You have to write a good sentence.” That is a lesson I have been trying to learn for thirty-seven years. It has been an imperfect progress.
A couple of years ago I was a participant in the annual Kentucky Arts and Letters Day held at The Berry Center in New Castle. It was time for Gray Zeitz, fellow poet and the proprietor of Larkspur Press, which has published many letterpress editions of Wendell’s writings for over 50 years. Gray walked to the front and read a handful of his wonderful and whimsical Zen-like poems, smiled once he had finished and ambled back to his seat. I happened to be sitting next to Wendell for this reading. After Gray began walking back Wendell remarked to no one in particular, “I’d bet that man has never hurried a day in his life.” I am certain that is true, just as I know Wendell was an affectionate and curious observer of people because he loved us.
I have been fortunate to have excellent teachers and mentors, but Wendell was the best teacher I ever had, not just for writing, but for being a citizen of this world. His life and his work have been great gifts, and he gave them freely and very often with a huge guffaw and a slap of his hand on a bony thigh.
