this is a plea for humility

THIS IS A PLEA FOR HUMILITY.Wendell Berry Collected Works

Know the Dark 2

Local Knowledge in the Age of Information 3

After Time 8

The Morning News 10

Are You All Right? 12

A Praise 19

Our Children Coming of Age 21

Wendell Berry 22

THIS IS A PLEA FOR HUMILTY 1

Wendell Berry Collected Works

THIS IS A PLEA FOR HUMILITY 3

Know the DarkTo go in the dark with a light is to know the light.To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Local Knowledge in the Age

Of Information

THIS IS A PLEA FOR HUMILITY2

IN 1983, REVIEWING A BOOK of agricultural essays by Wes Jackson and one by me, Lewis Hyde suggested that our two books were part of an effort of the periphery to be heard by the center. This has stayed in my mind as perhaps the most useful thing that has been said about my agricultural writing and that of my allies. It is useful because the dichotomy between center and periphery does in fact exist, as does the tendency of the center to be ignorant of the periphery.

These terms appear to be plain enough, but as I am going to use them here they may need a little clarification. We can say, for example, that a land grant university is a center with a designated periphery, which it is supposed to maintain and improve. Or an industrial city is a center with a Periphery which it is bound to influence and which, according to its politics and its power, it may either conserve or damage. Or a national or a state government is a center solemnly entrusted with responsibility for peripheral places, but in general it

extends its protections and favors to the commercial centers, which outvote or out-”contribute” the periphery. But above all, now, as a sort of center of centers, is the global “free market” economy of the great corporations, the periphery of which is everywhere, and for its periphery this center expresses no concern and acknowledges no responsibility.

The global economy is a development —it is intended apparently as the culmination —of the technological and commercial colonialist orthodoxy that has dominated the world increasingly since the Renaissance, the principle of the orthodoxy being that any commercial entity is entitled to wealth according to its power. Center, then, as I will use the term, is wherever the wealth, power, and knowledge of this overbearing economy have accumulated. Modern technology, as it has developed from oceanic navigation to the World Wide Web, has been increasingly a centralizing force, enabling ever-larger accumulations of wealth,

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It is still true also that the people of the center believe that the people of the periphery will always supply their needs from the land and will always keep the land productive.

power, and knowledge in an ever-smaller number of centers.

Since my concern here is with the need for communication—or, as I would pre-fer to say, conversation—between periphery and center, I must begin with the center’s characteristic ignorance of the periphery. This, I suppose, must always have been so, even of the market towns of the world before the Renaissance. But in that older world, the cities and towns mostly (though with significant exceptions) could take for granted that their tributary landscapes were populated by established rural communities that knew both how to make the land produce and how to take care of it.

It is still true that the center is supported by the periphery. All human economy is still land-based. To the extent that we must eat and drink and be clothed, sheltered, and warmed, we live from the land. The idea that we have now progressed from a land-based economy to an economy based on information is a fantasy.

It is still true also that the people of the center believe that the people of the periphery will always supply their needs from the land and will always keep the

land productive: There will always be an abundance of food, fiber, timber, and fuel. This too is a fantasy. It is not known, but is simply taken for granted.

As its power of attraction increases, the center becomes more ignorant of the periphery. And under the pervasive influence of the center, the economic landscapes of the periphery have fewer and fewer inhabitants who know them well and know how to care properly for them. Many rural areas are now populated mostly by urban people. Insofar as the center is utterly dependent upon the periphery, its ignorance of the periphery is not natural or necessary, but is merely dangerous. The danger is increased when this ignorance protects itself

by contempt for the people who know. If the most intimate knowledge of the land from which you live belongs to people whom you consider to be provincials or field niggers or hillbillies or hicks or rednecks, then you are not likely ever to learn very much.

Furthermore, the danger increases as the periphery is enlarged; the vulnerability of long supply lines is well understood. To give the most obvious example, the United States has chosen (if that is the right word) to become an import-dependent society rather than to live principally from its own land and the

work of its own people, as if dependence on imported goods and labor can be consistent with political independence and self determination. This inconsistency is making us, willy-nilly, an imperial power, which perhaps increases “business opportunities” for our government’s corporate sponsors, but certainly increases our fragility and our peril. The economic independence of families, communities, and even regions has now been almost completely destroyed.

Far from caring for our land and our rural people, as we would do if we understood our dependence on them, we have not, as a nation, given them so much as a serious thought for half a century. I read, I believe, my full share

of commentary on politics and economics by accredited experts, and I can assure you that you will rarely find in any of them even a passing reference to agriculture or forestry. Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an actual country lies out there beyond the places of power, wealth, and knowledge. The ultimate official word on agriculture seems to have been spoken by Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, who told the farmers to “Get big or get out.”

The general complacency about such matters seems to rest on the assumption that

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The center may need to pay attention to the periphery and accept its influence simply in order to survive.

The center may need to pay attention to the periphery and accept its influence simply in order to survive.

science can serve as a secure connection between land and people, designing beneficent means and methods of land use and assuring the quality and purity of our food. But we cannot escape or ignore the evidence that this assumption is false.

There is, to begin with, too great a gap between the science and the practice of agriculture. This gap is inherent in the present organization of intellectual and academic life, and it formalizes the differences between knowing and doing, the laboratory or classroom and the world. It is generally true that agricultural scientists are consumers rather than producers of agricultural products. They eat

with the same freedom from farm work, weather, and the farm economy as other consumers, and perhaps with the same naive confidence that a demand will dependably call forth a supply.

Moreover, the official agriculture of science, government, and agribusiness has been concerned almost exclusively with the ability of the land to produce food and fiber, and ultimately salaries, grants, and profits. It has correspondingly neglected its ecological and social responsibilities, and also, in many ways, its agricultural ones. It has ignored agriculture’s continuing obligations to be diverse,

conservative of its means, and respectful of its natural supports.

This would be fine, of course, if the recommended solutions were in fact solving the problems. But too often they not only fail to solve the problems, but either make them worse or replace them with new problems. And so, as we continue our enterprise of “sound science” and technological progress, our agriculture becomes more and more toxic, specialized, and impoverished of genes, breeds, and varieties; we deplete the aquifers and the rivers; our rural communities die; our fields and our food become less healthful; our food supply becomes evermore dependent on long-distance transportation and immigrant labor; our

wate becomes less drinkable; the hypoxic zone grows in the Gulf of Mexico.

These calamities of industrial agriculture define our need to take seriously Wes Jackson’s insistence that we need a farm population large, alert, and skilled enough, not just to make the land produce, but to take the best possible care of it as well. At present we are so far from this goal that number of depopulated rural communities in the prairie states are offering free land and other economic incentives to new settlers.

But we need to consider the possibility that even our remnant farm population possesses knowledge and experience that is indispensable in a rapidly urban-izing world. The center may need to pay attention to the periphery and accept its influence simply in order to survive. I have at hand three testimonials to the value of peripheral knowledge, and remarkably they all come from scientists. The first is from Robert B. Weeden, a biologist and writer who has done much of his work in Alaska:

If science took on a regional/local focus, one result would be that, for the first time in three centuries, the gap between scientist and citizen would start to

close. What we would see is that the conduct of critiqued experiment (science) and the close observation of unfolding life (common sense) would form a team. I watched this notion be born and begin its childhood in Alaska’s north. Scientists, newcomers from the south, were hired by federal agencies and oil corporations to find out something about the environments in which petroleum exploration and production would occur. Time was scarcer than money.

Some of the scientists had enough casual conversation with Inuit and Yupik people to realize that if you wanted guides to the seasonal behavior of sea ice


and its inhabitants, local people were far better sources than the thin and inad-equate records of earlier scientists. The informal conversation grew into formal conferences, funding, and ongoing committees. To be honest, government and corporate motives were mixed, because, in addition to knowing something, native people also controlled access to places the oil folk wanted to explore. Nevertheless, two systems of knowledge did come together.

My second witness is the geographer, Carl Sauer, who wrote:

If I should move to the center of the mass I should feel that the germinal potential was out there on the periphery.

And, finally, I offer a rather emphatic statement form the biologist Roger Payne’s book, Among Whales:

Any observant local knows more than any visiting scientist. Always. No exceptions.

That the center at present is ignorantly dependent on the periphery does not suggest that the center is somehow inherently worthless. It is not. The periphery needs a center, just as a center needs a periphery. One is unthinkable without the other. The center collects and stores things of value. It is a place of economic

and cultural exchange. It is the right place for a stockyard or a university. The distinction I am working toward is that between an ignorant center and one that is properly knowledgeable, and also that between an ignorant periphery and one that is properly knowledgeable. The critical point is that to be properly knowledge-able each must be in conversation with the other. They must know the truth of their interdependence; they must know what they owe to each other.

Our great modern powers of science, technology, and industry are always offering themselves to us with the suggestion that we know enough to use them well, that we are intelligent enough to act without limit in our own behalf. But the evidence is now rapidly mounting against us. By living as we do, in our ignorance and our pride, we are diminishing our world and the possibility of life..


THIS IS A PLEA FOR HUMILITY.

After Time


The land is an ark, full of things waiting.Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracksfilling with water as the foot is raised.The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Handsbecome obscure in their use, prehistoric.The mind passes over changed surfaceslike a boat, drawn to the thought of roofsand to the thought of swimming and wading birds.Along the river croplands and gardensare buried in the flood, airy places grown darkand silent beneath it. Under the slender branchholding the new nest of the hummingbirdthe river flows heavy with earth, the waterturned the color of broken slopes. I standdeep in the mud ofthe shore, a stakeplanted to measure the rise, the water rising,the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwoodpasses down, the leaves shivering as the rootsdrag the bottom. I was not ready for thisparting, my native land putting out to sea.

I was not ready for this parting, my native land putting out to sea.

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THE MORNING NEWS10

THE MORNING NEWSTo moralize the state, they drag out a man,and bind his hands, and darken his eyeswith 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 beastis 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 as waste, who has made himself lonelyamong 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 headat night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyesopen to the dark. Weary, we lie awakein the agony of the old giving birth to the newwithout 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 turninggreen with the young grass of April. What must I doto go free? I think I must put ona deathlier knowledge, and prepare to dierather than enter into the design of man’s hate.I will purge my mind of the airy claimsof church and state. I will serve the earthand not pretend my life could better serve.

Another morning comes with its strange cure.The earth is news. Though the river floodsand the spring is cold, my heart goes on,faithful to a mystery in a cloud,


THE SPRING WORK HAD STARTED, and I needed a long night’s rest, or that was my opinion, and I was about to go to bed, but then the telephone rang. It was Elton. He had been getting ready for bed, too, I think, and it had occurred to him then that he was worried.

“Andy, when did you see the Rowanberrys?”

I knew what he had on his mind. The river was in flood. The backwater was over the bottoms, and Art and Mart would not be able to get out except by boat or on foot.

“Not since the river came up.”

“Well, neither have I. And their phone’s out. Mary, when did Mart call up here?”

I heard Mary telling him, “Monday night,” and then, “It was Monday night,” Elton said to me. “I’ve tried to call every day since, and I can’t get anybody. That’s four days.”

“Well, surely they’re all right.”

“Well, that’s what Mary and I have been saying. Surely they are. They’ve been taking care of themselves a long time. But, then, you never know.”

“The thing is, we don’t know.”

We knew what we were doing, and both of us were a little embarrassed about it. The Rowanberry Place had carried that name since the first deeds were recorded in the log cabin that was the first courthouse at Hargrave. Rowanberrys had been taking care of themselves there for the better part of two hundred years. We knew that Arthur and Martin Rowanberry required as little worrying about as anybody alive. But now, in venturing to worry about them, we had put them, so to speak, under the sign of mortality. They were, after all, the last of the Rowanberrys, and they were getting old. We were uneasy in being divided from them by the risen water and out of touch. It caused us to think of things that could happen.

Elton said, “It’s not hard, you know, to think of things that could happen.”

“Well,” I said, “do you think we’d better go see about them?”


ARE YOU ALRIGHT?

He laughed. “Well, we’ve thought, haven’t we? I guess we’d better go.”

“All right. I’ll meet you at the mailbox.”

I hung up and went to get my cap and jacket. I picked up a flashlight as I went out the door, but it was not much needed. The moon was big, bright enough to put out most of the stars. I walked out to the mailbox and made myself comfortable, leaning against it. Elton and I had obliged ourselves to worry about the Rowanberrys, but I was glad all the same for the excuse to be out. The night was still, the country all silvery with moonlight, inlaid with bottomless shadows, and the air shimmered with the trilling of peepers from every stream and pond margin for miles, one full-throated sound filling the ears so that it seemed impos-sible that you could hear anything else.

And yet I heard Elton’s pickup while it was still a long way off, and then light glowed in the air, and then I could see his headlights. He turned into the lane and stopped and pushed the door open for me. I made room for myself among a bundle of empty feed sacks, two buckets, and a chain saw.

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“Fine night,” he said. He had lit a cigarette, and the cab was fragrant with smoke.

“It couldn’t be better, could it?”

“Well, the moon could be just a little brighter, and it could be a teensy bit warmer.”

I could hear that he was grinning. He was in one of his companionable moods, making fun of himself. I laughed, and we rode without talking up out of the Katy’s Branch valley and turned onto the state road.

The Rowanberrys were Elton’s friends, and because they were his, they were

mine. Elton had known them ever since he was just a little half-orphan boy, living with his mother and older brothers on the next farm up the creek. He had got a lot of his raising by being underfoot and in the way at the Rowanberrys’. And in the time of his manhood, the Rowanberry Place had been one of his resting places.

Elton worked hard and worried hard, and he was often in need of rest. But he

had a restless mind, which meant that he could not rest on his own place in the presence of his own work. If he rested there, first he would begin to think about what he had to do, and then he would begin to do it.

To rest, he needed to be in somebody else’s place. We spent a lot of Sunday afternoons down at the Rowanberrys’, on the porch looking out into the little valley in the summertime, inside by the stove if it was winter. Art and Mart batched there together after their mother died, and in spite of the electric lights and telephone and a few machines, they lived a life that would have been recognizable to Elias Rowanberry, who had marked his X in the county’s first

deed book-a life that involved hunting and fishing and foraging as convention-ally as it involved farming. They practiced an old-fashioned independence, an old-fashioned generosity, and an old-fashioned fidelity to their word and their friends. And they were hound men of the old correct school. They would not let a dog tree anywhere in earshot, day or night, workday or Sunday, without going to him. “It can be a nuisance,” Art said, “but it don’t hardly seem right to disappoint ‘em.”

Mart was the one Elton liked best to work with. Mart was not only a fine hand but had a gift for accommodating himself to the rhythms and ways of his partner. “He can think your thoughts,” Elton said. Between the two of them was a sympathy of body and mind that they had worked out and that they trusted with an unshaken, unspoken trust. And so Elton was always at ease and quiet in Mart’s company when they were at rest.

Art was the rememberer. He knew what he knew and what had been known by a lot of dead kinfolks and neighbors. They lived on in his mind and spoke there, reminding him and us of things that needed to be remembered. Art had a com-

pound mind, as a daisy has a compound flower, and his mind had something of the unwary comeliness of a daisy. Something that happened would remind him of something that he remembered, which would remind him of something that his grandfather remembered. It was not that he “lived in his mind.” He lived in the place, but the place was where the memories were, and he walked among them, tracing them out over the living ground. That was why we loved him.

Elton stopped the truck. He turned off his headlights and the engine, and the

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But what if we got no answer? We could only go as near as we could get and call.

quietness of the moonlight and the woods came down around us. I could hear the peepers again. It was wonderful what the road going under the water did to that place. It was not only that we could not go where we were used to going; it was as if a thought that we were used to thinking could not be thought.

Elton quietly opened his door and got out and then, instead of slamming the door, just pushed it to. I did the same and came around and followed him as he walked slowly down the road, looking for a place to climb out of the cut.

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.

But we were thinking, too, of the Rowanberrys. That we were in a mood to loiter and did not loiter would have reminded us of them, if we had needed reminding. To go to their house, with the water up, would have required a long walk from any place we could have started. We were taking the shortest way,

which left us with the problem that it was going to be a little too short. The best we could do, this way, would be to come down the valley until we would be across from the house but still divided from it by a quarter mile or more of back-water. We could call to them from there. But what if we got no answer? What if the answer was trouble? Well, they had a boat over there. If they needed us, one of them could set us over in the boat. But what if we got no answer? What iif, to put the best construction upon silence, they could not hear us? Well, we could only go as near as we could get and call.

So if our walk had the feeling of a ramble, it was not one. We were going as

straight to the Rowanberrys’ house as the water and the lay of the land would allow. After a while we began to expect to see a light. And then we began to wonder if there was a light to see.

Elton stopped. “I thought we’d have seen their light by now.”

I said, “They’re probably asleep.”

Those were the first words we had spoken since we left the truck. After so long,


But what if we got no answer? We could only go as near as we could get and call.

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Rowanberrys had been taking care of themselves there for the better part of two hundred years. We knew that Arthur and Martin Rowanberry required as little worrying about as anybody alive. But now, in venturing to worry about them, we had put them, so to speak, under the sign of mortality.

Rowanberrys had been taking care


Rowanberrys had been taking care of themselves there for the better part of two hundred years. We knew that Arthur and Martin Rowanberry required as little worrying about as anybody alive. But now, in venturing to worry about them, we had put them, so to speak, under the sign of mortality.

Rowanberrys had been taking care mselves there for

in so much quiet, our voices sounded small.

Elton went on among the trees and the shadows, and I followed him. We climbed over a little shoulder of the slope then and saw one window shining. It was the light of an oil lamp, so their electricity was out, too.

“And now we’re found,” Elton said. He sang it, just that much of the old hymn, almost in a whisper.

We went through a little more of the woods and climbed the fence into the Rowanberrys’ hill pasture. We could see their big barn standing up black now against the moonlight on the other side of the road, which was on high ground at that place, clear of the backwater. When we were on the gravel we could hear our steps. We walked side by side, Elton in one wheel track, I in the other, until the road went under the water again. We were as close to the house then as we could get without a boat. We stopped and considered the distance.

And then Elton cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Ohhhhh, Mart! Ohhhhh, Art!”

We waited, it seemed, while Art had time to say, “Did you hear somebody?” and Mart to answer, “Well, I thought so.” We saw light come to another window, as somebody picked up a lamp and opened the hall door. We heard the front door open. And then Art’s voice came across the water: “Yeeeaaah?”

And Elton called back, “Are you aaallI riiight?”

I knew they were. They were all right, and we were free to go back through the woods and home to sleep.

But now I know that it was neither of the Rowanberrys who was under the sign of mortality that night. It was Elton. Before another April came he would be in his grave on the hill at Port William. Old Art Rowanberry, who had held him on his lap, would survive him by a dozen years.

And now that both of them are dead, I love to think of them standing with the shining backwater between them, while Elton’s voice goes out across the distance, is heard and answered, and the other voice travels back: “Yeeeaaah!”


But now I know that it was neither of the Rowanberrys who was under the sign of mortality that night. It was Elton.

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A PraiseHis memories lived in the placelike fingers locked in the rock ledgeslike roots. When he diedand his influence entered the airI said, Let my mind be the earthof his thought, let his kindnessgo ahead of me. Though I do not escapethe history barbed in my flesh,certain wise movements of his hands,the turns of his speechkeep with me. His hope of peacekeeps with me in harsh days,the shell of his breath dimming awaythree summers in the earth.

In the great circle, dancing inand out of time, you move nowtoward your partners, answeringthe music suddenly audible to youthat only carried you beforeand will carry you again.When you meet the destined onesnow dancing toward you,we will be in line behind you,out of your awareness for the time,we whom you know, others we rememberwhom you do not remember, othersforgotten by us all.When you meet, and hold lovein your arms, regardless of all,the unknown will dance away from youtoward the horizon of light.Our names will flutteron these hills like little fires.

Our Children Coming of Age


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WENDELL BERRY

processes of his world, because “the rhythms of the land are an analogue by which we understand ourselves” (Prunty 958).

Berry’s artistic vision of agricultural work, then, is diametrically opposed to the industrial vision, which maximizes agricultural mechanization in order to mini-mize human interaction with and care of the land. Separating humans as far as possible from Nature in practice has created a character-killing and “community-killing agriculture, with its monomania of bigness” (UA 41).

Aside from our suicidal depletion of natural resources, one of Berry’s concerns is that our attitude towards the land necessitates our estrangement from it. Berry has said that “my sense of values comes from what I’m rooted in, what I believe in” (Ehrlich 11). To him, Nature, more specifically, the Nature of his particular place, serves as a moral teacher.

Berry’s premise, implicit, often explicit, in almost all of his work, is that we must have a particular place, must identify with it, must learn from it, must love it, must care for it. And only by living in this place long enough, and by attending to the knowledge of those who have lived there before us, will we fully realize the consequences of our presence there: “We may deeply affect a place we own for good or ill,” Berry has written, “but our lives are nevertheless included in its life; it will survive us, bearing the results” (LLH 143).

agricultural theories and practices assume universal applications. But such at-titudes and practices constitute an affront to Nature--that is, the particular Nature of a particular place. Traditional farmers are sensitive to the particular needs of their farms; through the years and generations they have looked to the Nature of their place to judge which practices, plants, and animals work and thrive the best, given the farm’s conditions: “A man ought to study the wilderness of a place” (LLH 206).

Berry believes that a “place” has its own ruling Nature. Thus, Berry stresses that a traditional farmer will always consider and adapt his practices to the needs of the land’s primal character. Successful and sustainable agriculture, then, as Berry understands it, is possible only by maintaining a cyclic vision, one attuned with Nature, rather than a linear vision, one seeking conquest of Nature.

The more a person is removed from the substance of his work, Berry argues, the greater is his tendency to neglect or to ignore it. He says that a traditional farmer “will walk his fields out of interest; the industrial farmer or manager only out of necessity” (UA 188). Traditional care requires a comprehensive, intimate, often passionate knowledge of the Nature of one’s place.

Berry is the fifth generation of his father’s family and the sixth generation of his mother’s to farm in Henry County, Kentucky. Loyal to the cyclic vision, he knows the history of his ancestors on the land, and he understands how each has affected the other. To Berry, farming the land requires the same discipline as writing a poem. Like the farmer, the poet must stay in tune with the natural

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 “continu-ing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of harmony with the natural world” (13). To proponents of modern “progress,” Berry’s ideas must seem regressive, unrealistic, radical. But no advice could be more needed and more practical, if we are to progress.

Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching, his home and family, and all that each involves are extraordinarily integrated. He understands his writing as an attempt to elucidate certain connections, primarily the interrelationships and interdependencies of man and the natural world.

The traditional community is one of Berry’s central metaphors for cultural and natural harmony. Such a community is a highly intricate alliance in which individuals function as “parts” of a membership, each depending on and affect-ing all the others. The traditional community, like the traditional farms within it, is a model of interdependency. Berry explains, “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives” (LLH 61).

The modern agricultural crisis, as Berry sees it, is a consequence of widening the gap between the way nature farms and the way man farms. Many modern


WENDELL BERRY

POETRY

The Broken Ground, 1964Clearing, 1977Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982The Country of Marriage, 1973Entries, 1994Farming: A Hand Book, 1970Given: New Poems, 2005Openings, 1968A Part, 1980Sabbaths: Poems, 1987Sayings and Doings, 1975The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998The Wheel, 1982

FICTION

Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992Hannah Coulter, 2004Jayber Crow, 2000The Memory of Old Jack, 1974Nathan Coulter, 1960A Place on Earth, 1967Remembering, 1988That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptol-emy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986A World Lost, 1996

ESSAYS

Another Turn of the Crank, 1996The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002Citizenship Papers, 2003A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1981Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990The Hidden Wound, 1970Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987Life Is a Miracle, 2000The Long-Legged House, 2004Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992Standing by Words, 1983The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977What Are People For?, 1990

Selected Works


Works CitedBerry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricul-tural. (CH) New York: Harcourt, 1972.

---. “The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16-22. (Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?)

---. The Long-Legged House. (LLH) New York: Harcourt, 1969.

---. Standing by Words. (SBW) San Francisco: North Point, 1983.

---. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986.

---. What Are People For? (WPF) San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry Studies 2.1 (1971): 7-15.

Driskell, Leon V. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 5: 62-66.

Ehrlich, Arnold W. “Wendell Berry” (An interview with Wendell Berry). Publishers Weekly 5 Sept. 1977: 10-11.

Norman, Gurney. From This Valley. Kentucky Educational Television Video.

Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and Myth Again.” The Southern Review 20 (1984): 958-68.

Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9-14.

This book was designed by Paul Roth

in April 2012 for the Type II studio at Washington University in St. Louis.

Photography by Paul Roth

(Cover and Wendell Berry Protrait photography were appropiated from the internet)

this is a plea for humility

Documents