reading

Introduction

A Native Hill (1968)

The Making of a Marginal Farm (1980)

Think Little (1970)

Nature as Measure (1989)

The Total Economy (2000)

Writer and Region (1987)

Damage (1974)

The Work of Local Culture (1988)

The Unsettling of America (1977)

The Agrarian Standard (2002)

The Pleasures of Eating (1989)

Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving (1978)

Getting Along with Nature (1982)

A Few Words for Motherhood (1980)

Two Minds (2002)

The Prejudice against Country People (2001)

Faustian Economics (2006)

Quantity versus Form (2004)

Word and Flesh (1989)

Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987)

Feminism, the Body, and the Machine (1989)

Family Work (1980)

Rugged Individualism (2004)

Economy and Pleasure (1988)

In Distrust of Movements (1998)

In Defense of Literacy (1970)

Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience in Honor of Don Pratt (1968)

Compromise, Hell! (2004)

The Way of Ignorance (2004)

The Future of Agriculture (2011)

The Rise (1969)

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Introduction

In tribute to Wendell Berry, I am writing this introduction longhand, in pen, in a small hardback notebook. It seems appropriate. Berry has never upgraded his writing tools from a pencil even to a typewriter, let alone to anything more complex, as he explains in his short but high-impact essay ‘Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ here. As with all his decisions, this one seems to have been taken after a good deal of thinking. In his writing, as in his farming, Wendell Berry’s readers get the impression that this man does not do anything lightly, and that he chooses his words as carefully as his actions.

With that in mind, and now that I think about it, I see that he would probably take issue with the way I have just lazily used the word ‘upgraded’. Not just because of the word’s ugliness, but because of its implication: that a pencil is a lesser tool than a laptop, simply because it is older and less complex. Older and less complex, in Berry’s world, are often virtues. Now in his eighties, he still uses horses to work his Kentucky farm, not for the nostalgia value but because horses do a better job than tractors, and are more satisfying to work with, as he explains in ‘Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving’ here.

As with all thinkers who choose to set their face against both fashion and power, Wendell Berry is regularly caricatured for the crime of thinking things through – accused of ‘living in the past’, ‘wanting to turn the clock back’ and various other predictable insults grabbed at random from the progressive toolbag. From one angle he can certainly appear, as he acknowledges himself, a relic from the past. Born at the height of the Great Depression into a farming family which, like all its neighbours, still worked their land the preindustrial way, he is a unique figure in modern American letters. Brought up as a farmer, he left the land as a young man to study and travel, eventually moving to New York City to ‘be a writer’. Writers, then as now, in the long shadow of Modernism, were supposed to ensconce themselves in the metropolis and live as placeless chroniclers of its unease.

But it wasn’t long before Berry felt drawn back to rural Kentucky, where he had grown up. The place was pulling him. Places, in my experience, often do that. I think that some places want writers to tell their stories. Wendell Berry was never meant to tell the stories of New York City; there were quite enough people doing that already. So, as his fellow scribes looked at him aghast, some of them trying to persuade him of his foolishness, he left the city and went back to the land, buying a farm five miles from where he had grown up, in the area where both his mother and father had grown up before him. This is the place in which he has lived, worked and written for the last half-century. This is the place whose story he has told, and through it he has told the story of America, and through that the story of modern humanity as it turns its back on the land and lays waste to the soil.

Soil is the recurring image in these essays. Again and again, Berry worries away at the question of topsoil. This is both a writer’s metaphor and a farmer’s reality, and for Wendell Berry, metaphors always come second to reality. ‘No use talking about getting enlightened or saving your soul,’ he wrote to his friend, the poet Gary Snyder, in 1980, ‘if you can’t keep the topsoil from washing away.’ Over the last century, by some estimates, over half the world’s topsoil has been washed away by the war on nature that we call industrial farming. We may have perhaps fifty or sixty years of topsoil left if we continue to erode, poison and lay waste to it at this rate. As the human population continues to burgeon, the topsoil in which it grows its food continues to collapse. It is perhaps the least sexy environmental issue in the world, but for the future of human civilization, which continues to depend upon farmers whether it knows it or not, it may be the most important.

Wendell Berry knows this, because he sees it every day, and because he works with it. I have spent the last several months reading every book of essays he has ever published, and the image which has stayed with me above all others comes at the beginning of his 1988 essay ‘The Work of Local Culture’ here. An old galvanized bucket hangs on a fence post near a hollow, in a wood on what was once his grandfather’s farm. In the bucket, slowly and over many decades, soil is being born:

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings and perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human.

In patience, in slowness, there is hope. In the places where we often deposit our hopes, meanwhile, there is less. Berry’s questing thoughtfulness challenges traditional political categories; challenges notions of activism, of movements, of politics itself on a national and global scale. All this makes liberating reading for those who enjoy thinking for themselves. To the ‘right’ he shows the consequences of a love of money and markets, of government by corporation, of an economic growth unmoored from place, which eats through nature and culture and leaves ruins. To the ‘left’ he shows the consequences of a rootless individualism, of rights without rites, of the rejection of family and tradition, of the championing of the cosmopolitan over the rooted and the urban over the rural.

In place of these tired labels, and for those who still insist on categories, Berry suggests two alternatives, originally coined by his mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner: ‘boomers’ and ‘stickers’. ‘Boomers’ are those who rush through and past, chasing the green grass or concreting it for money, the acolytes of growth-n-progressTM. ‘Stickers’ are those who find a place and make it home, stay in it and try to leave it a little better than they found it. Wendell Berry’s formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.

Wendell Berry has been an extremely prolific writer, and this selection is chosen from hundreds of essays written over five decades. This means it is necessarily partial and personal and incomplete, and I have probably given everybody something to complain about. Still, to me, the essays between these covers represent some of the best of the writing and thoughts of a remarkable man – farmer, poet, novelist, philosopher – who deserves to be better known outside America than he is. I hope this volume will win him some new admirers in a time when voices like his are urgently needed.

Paul Kingsnorth

County Galway, Ireland

May 2016

The Essential Wendell Berry

THE WORLD-ENDING FIRE

Selected and Introduced by
PAUL KINGSNORTH

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Introduction

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE WORLD-ENDING FIRE

The Essential Wendell Berry

THE WORLD-ENDING FIRE

Selected and Introduced by PAUL KINGSNORTH

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Introduction

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE WORLD-ENDING FIRE

Selected and Introduced by
PAUL KINGSNORTH