Wendell Berry passed the other day. He was, for many of us raised on the strange stretch of track where the American (tm), Christian, and Capitalist lines of belief ran together, the switch that made us question this trifecta as orthodox.
He was the spring from which the more mystical streams of thought ran at the tiny Christian college I graduated from, in a small Virginia town that was rapidly suburbanizing with DC sprawl. Its rolling countryside was becoming pocked with McMansions masquerading as country homes among the old Quaker farmhouses, tares in the wheatland.
After college, I moved into one of those Quaker farmhouses with a few friends, and I planted a garden. The property was a retired cattle farm--cows hadn't eaten its grass for twenty years, but the top six inches of soil still smelled of their shit, and that was one of the best gardens I've ever had.
That summer, I read Jayber Crow, and I wept when I got to its end. It was a Dantean tale of growing in love--in community with the imperfect people around you, and with the land and living things that also called it home, set against a growing notion of progress that turned the land into a mere resource to be exploited: I think that one of his central points was that, when one's relationship to living things lacks love, it turns to exploitation, and once one has learned to exploit one living thing, it is a slippery slope to exploiting any other living thing.
When I went to grad school, I largely set him aside. He, and his fictional communities, were SO WHITE AND SO MALE, and I was interested in exploring the narratives that I hadn't grown up with. I don't regret that exploration, but I do regret setting him aside.
Because the wisdom is rarely in the answers. It lies more often in the questions. Typewriters aren't for everyone, but that old Kentucky fella click-clacking away was, simply by virtue of existing as himself and his intentional habits, a questioning of our app-addicted era. And he typed up good questions. What does it mean to be human? What makes a society good? What is the place of love in a society whose good is measured economically? Can all goods be measured?
He and Flannery O'Connor were probably flipsides of the same coin that bounced off the bridge of my early 20s nose, and started to wake me up.
He also captures an ache, for a community and a place, that my father's generation rejected, and that haunts mine. And I got to see the shift that caused that ache happen, in real time, when I was in Romania.
I met a couple mules recently. They were up in the mountains of western North Carolina and had their own personalities, and we got along in different ways--the one by nose-scratches, the other by giving him his damn space.
I've been thinking about them, and our Great Pyrenees who is not long for this world, and of the farmer my age who keeps a horse who hasn't been ridden in years. He keeps C-Boy out of affection. And our dog, who was raised on that farm, remembers C-Boy, too (with little affection).
And I think also of my neighbors who grow things--not because it's cheaper (it's not) or better (it is)--but because it's fun, and it's a participation in a broader web of life. And I think of the dead things we've fed into our garden to give new life--the leaves, the mushroom blocks, the grass, the bugs.
We're supposed to have fun--to make music, to dance, to mess up a painting, to laugh at the stray stroke. And we're supposed to participate in life--to dig in the dirt, to get bugs on us while we pick muscadines, to make and know the names of things, to smell the stink of ferment as life turns to life turns to life, woven against the constant warp of death.
Berry's weakness in the broader American context was probably that he was so concentrated on finding the good in the things around him that he was less interested in sniffing out evils that he couldn't see. And he was an heir to the 1920s Agrarian/Fugitive Poets, who all (besides Donald Davidson) progressed past their Lost Cause mythology. But that part of his writing was not central to his primary project, though it was a stain on it.
I'd be curious to read his correspondence with bell hooks, a fellow Kentuckian who encouraged him to look beyond the farm. I’ve just ordered her “belonging: a culture of place.” Both hooks and Berry shared a concern with love and a transcendent good. And perhaps, in our time of good and evil, we need a loving vision of good that can laugh at the banal violence of evil, because it knows it can survive it.