Download - Wendell Berry: Life and Selected Works
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Wendell BerryLife and Selected Works
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Wendell BerryLife and Selected Works
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And the world cannot be
discovered by a journey of miles, no
matter how long, but only by a spiritual
journey, a journey of one inch, very
arduous and humbling and joyful, by which
we arrive at the ground at our feet, and
learn to be at home.
Wendell Berry
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Do not think me gentlebecause I speak in praiseof gentleness, or elegantbecause I honor the gracethat keeps this world. I ama man crude as any,gross of speech, intolerant,stubborn, angry, full
may have spoken wellat times, is not natural.A wonder is what it is.
A Warning to My Readers
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Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.
A Warning to My Readers
Do not think me gentlebecause I speak in praiseof gentleness, or elegantbecause I honor the gracethat keeps this world. I ama man crude as any,gross of speech, intolerant,stubborn, angry, full
may have spoken wellat times, is not natural.A wonder is what it is.
A Warning to My Readers
Collected Poems 2
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force everywhere, infections move.
We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans
against our con- tempt for small places and small
streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they
are understood collectively as large destructions.
Excessive nutrient runofffrom farms and animal
factories in the Mississippi water- shed has caused,
in the GulfofMexico, a hypoxic or dead zone offive
or six thousand square miles. In forty-odd years, strip
mining in the Appa- lachian coal fields, culminating
in mountain removal, has gone far toward the
destruction ofa whole region, with untold damage
to the regions peo- ple, to watersheds, and to the
waters downstream.
NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS deplore such human-
caused degradations of the oceans as the Gulf
of Mexicos dead zone, and reporters describe
practices like mountain removal mining in eastern
Kentucky. Some day we may finally understand
the connections.
The health of the oceans depends on the
health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on
the health ofsmall streams; the health ofsmall
streams dependsonthehealthoftheirwatersheds.
Thehealthofthewaterisexactly the same as the health
ofthe land; the health ofsmall places is exactly the
same as the health oflarge places. As we know,
disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in
Contempt for Small Places
There is not a more exemplary history of our
contempt for small places than that of Eastern
Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many
absentee corporate shareholders and left the
region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry
representatives are now defending mountain
removal-and its attendant damage to forests,
streams, wells, dwellings, roads, and community
life-by sayingthat in10, 15, 20 yearsthe land will
be restored, and that such mining has created
the [level] land needed for further industrial
development.
But when you remove a mountain you also remove
the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable
The Way of Ignorance 3
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The Way of Ignorance 4
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violence to the ecosystem and the water- shed. These
things are not to be restored in ten or twenty years, or
in ten or twenty hundred years. As for the manufacture
oflevel places for industrial development, the supply
has already far exceeded any foreseeable demand.
And the devastation continues.
The contradictions in the states effort to balance
the competing inter- ests were stated as follows by
Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian
Commission: Ifyou dont have mining, you dont have
an economy, and ifyou dont have an economy you
dont have a way for the people to live. But ifyou dont
have environmental quality, you wont create the kind
of place where people want to live.
Yes. And if the clearly foreseeable result is a region
offlat industrial sites where nobody wants to live, we
need a better economy.
The Way of Ignorance 5/6
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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my childrens lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The Peace of Wild Things
Openings 7
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The Peace of Wild Things
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it
Work Song, Part 2: A Vision
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this
place, the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.
The Way of Ignorance 8
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They all had worked together a long time. They all
knew what each one was good at.
When they worked together, not much needed to
be explained. When they went down to the little
weatherboarded church at Goforth on Sunday
morning, they were glad to see one another and had
much to say, though they had seen each other almost
daily during the week.
This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and
took them in with a warmth that answered her
parents rejection. The men, without asking or being
asked, included
Elton in whatever they were doing. They told him
when and where they needed him. They came to
the families were conscious of themselves in a way
that set them apart from one another. Here, in this
new world, neighbors were always working together.
Many hands make light work, Uncle Isham Quail
loved to say, though his own old hands were no
longer able to work much.
Some work only the men did together, like haying
and harvesting the corn. Some work only the women
did together: sewing or quilting or wallpapering or
housecleaning; and whenever the men were together
working, the women would be together cooking.
Some work the men and women did together:
harvesting tobacco or killing hogs or any other job
that needed many hands. It was an old community.
A Jonquil for Mary Penn (excerpt)
It was a different world, a new world to her, that she
came into thena world of poverty and community.
They were in a neighborhood of six households,
counting their own, all within half a mile of one
another. Besides themselves there were Braymer
and Josie Hardy and their children; Tom Hardy
and his wife, also named Josie; Walter and Thelma
Cotman and their daughter, Irene; Jonah and Daisy
Hample and their children; and Uncle Isham and Aunt
Frances Quail, who were Thelma Cotmans and Daisy
Hamples parents. The two Josies, to save confusion,
were called Josie Braymer and Josie Tom. Josie
Tom was Walter Cotmans sister. In the world that
Mary Penn had given up, a place of far larger and
richer farms, work was sometimes exchanged, but
Fidelity 9
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Fidelity 10
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Fidelity 11/12
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him when he needed them. He was an apt and
able hand, and they were glad to have his help. He
learned from them all but liked best to work with
Walter Cotman, who was a fine farmer. He and
Walter were, up to a point, two of a kind; both were
impatient of disorderI cant stand a damned
mess, said Walter, and he made noneand both
loved the employment of their minds in their work.
They were unlike in that Walter was satisfied within
the boundaries of his little farm, but Elton could not
have been. Nonetheless, Elton loved his growing
understanding of Walters character and his ways.
Though he was a quiet man and gave neither
instruction nor advice, Walter was Eltons teacher,
and Elton was consciously his student.
Once, when they had killed hogs and Elton and Mary
had stayed at home to finish rendering their lard, the
boiling fat had foamed up and begun to run over the
sides of the kettle. Mary ran to the house and called
Walter on the party line. Tell him to throw the fire to
it, Walter said. Tell him to dip out some lard and
throw it on the fire.
Elton did so, unbelieving, but the fire flared, grew
hotter, the foaming lard subsided in the kettle, and
Eltons face relaxed from anxiety and self-accusation
into a grin.
Well, he said, quoting Walter in Walters voice, its
all in knowing how.
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Pray for good luck fishing
when the river floods.
V
Dont own so much clutter that you will be relieved to
see your house catch fire.
VI
Beware of the machinery of longevity. When a mans
life is over
the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not
withhold
itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.
VII
Put your hands into the mire.
They will learn the kinship
of the shaped and the unshapen
Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer
It is presumptuous and irresponsible to pray for other
people. Agood man would pray only for himself-that
he have as much good as he deserves, that he not
receive more good or more evil than he deserves,
that he bother nobody, that he not be bothered,
that he want less. Praying thus for himself, he should
prepare to live with the consequences.
II
At night make me one with the darkness.
In the morning make me one with the light.
III
If a man finds it necessary to eat garbage, he should
resist the temptation to call it a delicacy.
IV
Dont pray for the rain to stop.
Collected Poems 13
the living and the dead.
VIII
When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.
When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.
IX
Sowing the seed,
my hand is one with the earth.
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Collected Poems 14
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Wanting the seed to grow,
my mind is one with the light.
Hoeing the crop,
my hands are one with the rain.
Having cared for the plants,
my mind is one with the air.
Hungry and trusting,
my mind is one with the earth.
Eating the fruit,
my body is one with the earth.
X
Let my marriage be brought to the ground.
Let my love for this woman enrich the earth.
What is its happiness but preparing its
place?
What is its monument but a rich field?
Collected Poems 15/16
Xl
By the excellence of his work the workman is a
neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise
to own the salesman is a neighbor. By selling what is
good his character survives his market.
XII
Let me wake in the night
and hear it raining
and go back to sleep.
XIII
Dont worry and fret about the crops. After you have
done all you can for them, let them stand in the
weather on their own.
If the crop ofanyone year was all, a man would have
to cut his throat every time it hailed.
But the real products of any years work are the
farmers mind and the cropland itself.
If he raises a good crop at the cost of belittling
himself and diminishing the ground, he has gained
nothing. He will have to begin over again the next
spring, worse offthan before.
Let him receive the seasons increment into his mind.
Let him work it into the soil.
The finest growth that farmland can produce is a
careful farmer.
Make the human race a better head. Make the world
a better piece of ground.
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How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.
What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days field,
kept in all the bodys years, the bodys
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
Sabbaths 1985 V
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the bodys life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait ways ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.
Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.
A Timbered Choir 17/18
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Biography
Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1945 in Henry County Kentucky. Wendell graduated from the University of Kentucky with a Masters degree in English. After College he returned to his home to work the land that his family has farmed for two centuries.
He completed his first novel in 1960 and since then has written numerous books and poetry collections. Berry is a strong defender of family rural communities, and traditional family farms. Berrys father
was one of the founders of the organic farming movement, and today he and his father practice organic farming methods. He believes humans must learn to live in harmony with nature or realize they will perish. These strong ties with nature are extremely evident in writing.
Berry still uses a pen and paper, and occasionally a 1956 era typewriter, to do all of his writing. When asked why he does not get a computer he simply says he doesnt want to get sucked into buying
a piece of expensive equipment when he is already accustomed to using a pencil and paper.
Over the years Berry has written more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and novels, and has plans for even more. He is the poetic voice of the environmental movement and continues to support efforts to help preserve and protect nature.
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List of Works
Andy Catlett: Early Travels
A World Lost
Fidelity
Hannah Coulter
Jayber Crow
Nathan Coulter
Place on Earth
Remembering
That Distant Land
The Memory of Old Jack
The Wild Birds
Three Short Novels
Watch With Me
Whitefoot
Fiction
An Eastward Look
A Part
A Timbered Choir
The Broken Ground
Clearing
The Collected Poems
The Country of Marriage
Entries
The Farm
Farming
Leavings
The Mad Farmer Poems
Openings
Sabbaths
Sayings and Doings
Traveling at Home
The Wheel
Poetry
Essays
A Continuous Harmony
Another Turn Of The Crank
Citizenship Papers
The Gift of Good Land
In the Presence of Fear
Life Is a Miracle
Meeting the Expectations of the Land
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Standing By Words
Standing on Earth
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
What Are People For?
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Bibliography
Berry, Wendell. A Timbered Choir : The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997. Washington, D.C. : Counterpoint, c1998.
Collected poems, 1957-1982. San Francisco : North Point Press, c1984.
Fidelity: Five Stories. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
Openings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968.
The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.
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2011 E. M. Roper
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in St. Louis. For information please contact E.M. Roper at
[email protected] or call at 314.898.2247.
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