Wendell Berry

Summary: A collection of essays representing a cross-section on Berry’s critique of America’s consumptive culture as well as his ideas on good agriculture.

I suspect I am not the only one who thinks that all of Wendell Berry’s essays are just variations on a theme. But two things make “variations on a theme” either banale or briliant–the beauty of the theme and the skill of the composer. In the case of Berry, the theme is the utterly essential theme of living well in our show more place–our own patch of land, our community, our country, our planet. The variations include the disciplines that have shaped how we live in our place, the need to think little and local, the illusions of our industrial dreams, and the value of literacy and the importance of the language that we use.

The main entrée of the collection is an eleven part extended essay titled “Discipline and Hope.” Berry considers the various expressions of the industrial, exploitive disciplines of our technology–our focus on efficiency, consumption, the ways we abstract from the practical realities of the land. He contrasts our linear vision of progress with the cycles of birth, growth, fruit, decline, and death by which the earth is renewed each year. He calls for us to embrace at-one-ment.

He lays the basis for this in his opening essay, “A Secular Pilgrimage,” observing the seeming hatred of the creation by those professing belief in the Creator of all things, contrasting it with the testimony of “secular” nature poets who viewed the world with awe. This is followed by the appetizer of “Absence and Return,” in which he describes returning home from the West Coast and the renewed awareness as he walks his land that “everything is supposedly named and numbered and priced, are unlikely to know what lies out of sight of the paved roads.” Then we have a “sweet” essay paying tribute to another of those nature poets, William Carlos Williams, whose work he describes as “a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of that word.”

The final two appetizers offer complementary tastes, perhaps salad dishes, around the idea of thinking local in “The Regional Motive” and “Think Little.” The latter essay first appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and challenges the slogan to “Think Big.” He contends that while we are organizing trash cleanups, we need to pick some up ourselves, turn off lights, lower the thermostat, and refuse to buy the latest electric gadget, and grow some of your own food. “The Regional Motive” challenges our nomadic drive with one that stays home and lives in a way that preserves land for those who follow us.

Following the main essay, Berry offers two desserts that leave the taste of the whole meal with us. One, “In Defense of Literacy” argues for the practicality of literacy and the awareness of the importance of the words we use to describe what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary.” The other, “Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise” illustrates with the strip mining of Kentucky the philosophy playing out throughout the country of narrow measures of efficiency and profit that do not account for the people displaced, the soil polluted, the rivers ruined that cost as much or more to restore as the profits of the companies who inflicted these losses without requiring them to repay.

What is served up here is a wholesome country meal of Wendell Berry essays. Admittedly, some of the cultural references are dated, but people have turned up their noses to the hearty meal, preferring industrial fast food, as it were, to the wholesome messages in these essays. So, while the cultural references are dated, the underlying truths are not, and if anything, more desperately needed today. Everyone is still looking for technological fixes to our climate crisis that will allow us to preserve our consumptive lives. We have not heard Wendell Berry’s message calling us to a different way of living in our world, to a wholesome feast that is in “continuious harmony” with the life of our world. show less

I don't have much time to write reviews these days, but this book deserves at least a short one.

The book is extraordinary; it gains in depth and loveliness section by section as it goes. Berry has lived his life unconventionally, and this book feels like the fruit of that labor of integrity and wholeness. The forest is to him a blessing and so is his work, the people, and the land. Reading these poems, it's hard to imagine otherwise; the atmosphere they create is so powerful, the awareness show more of the living grace around them.

The attitude is quiet, musing, and contemplative but never hesitant. These poems know what they are and what they see. They see the both the darkness and the light. They feel loss, but they feel it with grace. There's no hint of pettiness in them anywhere.

It's a slender book, but I feel blessed by the gift of it. I see that Berry wrote several poetry books over the years with "Sabbaths" in the title, and I look forward to reading more of them. show less

Oh my goodness, what a read! I am so glad I dipped into Wendell Barry. His writing is magnificent and the story carried me through to the last page. This fictional tale told in a memoir form flows like a river of words winding through a single life. Barry's ever-flowing narrative moves from story-telling to philosophizing. He ably captured such topics as the worth of one life, the fullness of a small town, the satisfaction of a simple life, and the changing of norms between the young and the show more old.

Right now I am unsure as to whether I will read more of the Port William series. I am inclined to leave that image as seen through Jayber's eyes and be happy I went there. show less

I was ready to read something old-fashioned, something kind, and Wendell Berry's JAYBER CROW (2000) was just right. It is the life story of small-town Kentucky barber Jonah Crow, told in his own words, born in 1914, twice orphaned, who came of age in an orphanage (where he learned his trade), was briefly educated in a small, church college, having thought he'd heard "the call." Rejecting that, he wandered for a time, tasting city life in Lexington, and finally, during an historic flood, show more makes his way back 'home' to the tiny river town of Port William, where he opens his shop and supplements his income working as a church janitor and grave digger. A self-described "bald, ineligible bachelor," JAYBER, as the town barber, is privy to bits and pieces of all the local gossip and goings on, which he can't help piecing together. He has a wide circle of eccentric friends. He falls in love with Mattie Chatham, a girl a decade younger than he, watches her grow up and marry the local high school jock hero, who, it soon becomes obvious, is way too shallow and oblivious for her. Telling his story from the vantage point of retirement, he watches his friends LP, neighbors and customers grow old and die. He is denied enlistment for WWII due to a heart murmur. He ponders the mysteries of God, nature, religion and more. He finds his occasional pleasures in the local home brew and in the arms of an accommodating waitress in a nearby town, as he watches his real love's husband lay waste to her family farm and go deeply into debt constantly leasing more land and buying ever more expensive machinery. He retires to a "camp house" along the river, living without modern amenities.

As is true with all of Berry's books, there is much to ponder here (and I did). Wandering among the gravestones, for example, Jayber thinks, " It was a place of finality and order. The people there had lived their little passage of time in this world, had become what they became, and now could be changed only by forgiveness and mercy."

Of church going and preachers, he thinks, "While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from his he pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full if yearning and joy ..."

And, while burying Maggie's son Jimmy, killed in Vietnam, he considers the madness of war -

"... making war in order to make peace. We were destroying little towns in order to save them. We were killing children in order that children might sleep peacefully in their beds without fear ... I felt involved in an old sickness of the world. I was sick with that sickness and could see no end."

And of course there IS no end. Consider today's wars - Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and on and on and on. Even a seemingly kind, old-fashioned story like this one cannot remain untouched by the evil that is the always profitable arms industry and that military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against more than sixty years ago.

Wendell Berry is a deep, thoughtful writer, and it shows in this fictional story of one man's life in a small Kentucky town. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the REED CITY BOY memoir trilogy show less