SPECIMENa collection of writings by Wendell Berry

SPECIMENa collection of writings by Wendell Berry

Man cannot be independent of nature.

SPECIMENa collection of writings by Wendell Berry

Man cannot be independent of nature.

In one way or another he must live in relation to it, and

there are only two alternatives: the way of the frontiersman,

whose response to nature was to dominate it, to assert his

presence in it by destroying it;

or the way of Thoreau, who went to natural places to

become quiet in them, to learn from them, to be restored

by them. To know these places, because to know them is to

need them and respect them and be humble before them, is

to preserve them. To fail to know them, because ignorance

can only be greedy of them, is to destroy them.

THE MORNING’S NEWS To moralize the state, they drag out a man,

and bind his hands, and darken his eyes

with a black rag to be free of the light in them,

and tie him to a post, and kill him.

And I am sickened by complicity in my race.

To kill in hot savagery like a beast is understandable.

It is forgivable and curable.

But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath,

that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.

The serpent is gentle, compared to man.

It is man, the inventor of cold violence,

death and waste,

who has made himself lonely among the creatures,

and set himself aside,

so that he cannot work in the sun with hope,

or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.

The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head at night.

Uselessness and horror hold the eyes open to the dark.

Weary, we lie awake

in the agony of the old giving birth to the new

without assurance that the new will be better.

I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,

they are so open to the world.

I look at my sloping fields now turning green

with the young grass of April.

What must I do to go free?

I think I must put on a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die

rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.

Late in the night I pay

the unrest lowe

to the life that has never lived

and cannot live now.

What the world could be

is my good dream

and my agony when, dreaming it

I lie awake and turn and look into the dark.

I think of a luxury

in the sturdiness and grace

of necessary things,

not in frivolity.

That would heal the earth, and heal men.

But the end, too, is part

of the pattern, the last

labor of the heart:

to learn to lie still,

one with the earth again,

and let the world go.

AWAKE AT NIGHT

—I mean our country itself, our land.

This is a terrible thing to know,

but it is not a reason for despair

unless we decide to continue the destruction.

If we decide to continue the destruction,

that will not be because we have no other choice.

We are destroying our country

This destruction is not necessary.

It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.

Humans don’t have to live by destroying the sources of their life.

People can change; they can learn to do better.

All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land

to rise above the greed and contempt of our land’s exploiters.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

FEBRUARY 2, 1968

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

and coming back,

it forms its curves,

Going

a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.

Beans lift their heads up in the row.

The known returns to be known again.

the sap risen, leaf come back to branch, bird to nest crotch.

The hand is risen from the earth,THE FAMILIAR

Walking among the big trees

Once we had climbed the bank and stepped over the fence and were walking among the big trees, we seemed already miles from the truck. The water gleamed over the bottomlands below us on our right; you could not see that there had ever been a road in that place. I followed Elton along the slope through the trees. Neither of us thought to use a flashlight, though we each had one, nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything-underfoot the blooms of twinleaf, bloodroot, rue anemone, the little stars of spring beauties, and overhead the littlest branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the rain, and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around us seemed to float in the shadows so that we walked like waders among stars, uncertain how far down to put our feet. And over the broad shine of the backwater, the calling of the peepers rose like another flood, higher than the water flood, and thrilled and trembled in the air.

It was a long walk because we had to go around the inlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow. Way off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Once we startled a deer and stood still while it plunged away into the shadows. And always we were walking among flowers. I wanted to keep thinking that they were like stars, but after a while I could not think so. They were not like stars. They did not have that hard, distant glitter. And yet in their pale, peaceful way, they shone. They collected their little share of light and gave it back. Now and then, when we came to an especially thick patch of them, Elton would point. Or he would raise his hand and we would stop a minute and listen to the owls.

I was wider awake than I had been since morning would

have been glad to go on walking all night long. Around

us we could feel the year coming, as strong and wide and

irresistible as a wind.

Growing weather; enough rain;

the cow’s udder tight with milk;

the peach tree bent with its yield;

honey golden in the white comb—,

the pastures deep in clover and grass,

enough, and more than enough;

the ground, new worked, moist

and yielding underfoot, the feet

comfortable in it as roots;

the early garden: potatoes, onions,

peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots,

radishes, marking their straight rows

with green, before the trees are leafed,’

raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,

currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage,

strawberries red ripe with the white

flowers still on the vines-picked

with the dew on them, before breakfast,

grape clusters heavy under broad leaves,

powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness

—an ancient delight, delighting;

the bodies of children, joyful

without dread of their spending,

surprised at nightfall to be weary;

the bodies of women in loose cotton,

cool and closed in the evenings

of summer, like contented houses’,

the bodies of men, able in the heat

and sweat and weight and length

of the day’s work, eager in their spending,

attending to nightfall, the bodies of women;

THE SATISFACTIONS OF THE MAD FARMER

after sleep, enablement

to go on with work, morning a clear gift;

the maidenhood of the day,

cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass;

the work of feeding and clothing and housing,

done with more than enough knowledge

and with more than enough love,

by those who do not have to be told;

deer tracks in the wet path, the deer sprung from them, gone on;

the talk of friends, lightened and cleared by all that can be assumed;

any man whose words

lead precisely to what exists, who never stoops to persuasion;

any work worthy

of the day’s maidenhood;

any building well built, the rafters firm to the walls, the walls firm,

the joists without give, the proportions clear,

the fitting exact, even unseen,

bolts and hinges that turn home

without a jiggle;

sleep after love, dreaming white lilies blooming coolly out of the flesh;

a little clearing among cedars, white clover and

wild strawberries beneath an opening to the sky

—heavenly, I thought it,

so perfect; had I foreseen it

I would have desired it no less than it deserves;

the quiet in the woods of a summer morning,

the voice of a pewee passing through it

like a tight silver wire;

the great hollow-trunked beech, a landmark I loved to return to,

its leaves gold-lit on the silver branches in the fall: blown down

after a hundred years of standing, a footbridge over the stream;

live streams, live shiftings

of the sun in the summer woods;

What I know of spirit is astir

in the world. The god I have always expected

to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning,

I have always expected to be

a great relisher of this world, its good

grown immortal in his mind.

fox tracks in snow, the impact of lightness upon lightness,

unendingly silent.

THE SATISFACTIONS OF

Wendell Berry

lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of

more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Berry’s work is an ongoing

exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land, and his writing constitutes,

as Gary Tolliver has said, one man’s “continuing search for avenues of reentry into

a proper state of harmony with the natural world.” THE SATISFACTIONS OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992

Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987

Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005

Love this miraculous world that we did not make,

that is a gift to us.

This book was designed and printed by Michelle Nahmad in the Spring of 2013 at Washinton University in Saint Louis. It is set in DIN and Scala Sans. The images are a combination of self taken and treated photographs and hand cut paper.