wendell berry
DESCRIPTION
This is a collection of selected works by American author Wendell Berry that capture that mysterious moment between life and death. I used found imagery as well as hand painted textures within the sixteen spreads. The front cover and back cover are printed on top of cardboard to accentuate and I bound the book using perfect binding. The dimensions are 10” X 10”TRANSCRIPT
wendellBERRY
A journey between death and life and death once more.
THE MAN
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?
FARMINGTO
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. Among
his novels (set in the fictional community of Port William Kentucky) are Nathan
Coulter (1960), A Place on Earth (1967), and The Memory of Old Jack (1974);
short story collections include The Wild Birds (1986), Remembering (1988),
Fidelity (1993), and Watch With Me (1994); collections of essays include,
among many others, A Continuous Harmony (1972), The Unsettling of America
(1977), Recollected Essays (1981), and Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community
(=1993); and among his many volumes of poetry are A Part (1980), The Wheel
(1982), Collected Poems (1985) and Entries (1984).
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. One of his premises in The
Unsettling of America at once evinces his notion of cultural and natural interde-
pendency: “Everything in the Creation is related to everything else and
dependent on everything else” (46). The Unsettling of America is about connec-
tions and thus ramifications.
The man behind the writing
THE CAREER OF RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM in America has run
mostly to absurdity, tragic or comic. But it also has done us a certain
amount of good. There was a streak ont in Thoreau, who went alone to
jail in protest against the Mexican War. And that streak has continued
in his successors who have suffered penalties for civil disobedience
because of their perception that the law and the government were
not always or necessarily right. This is individualism of a kind rugged
enough, and it has been authenticated typically by its identification
with a communal good. The tragic version of rugged individualism is in
the presumptive “right” of individuals to do as they please, as if there
were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors,
and no posterity. This is most frequently understood as the right to do
whatever one pleases with one's property. One's property, according to
this formulation, is one's own absolutely.
Rugged individualism of this kind has cost us dearly in lost topsoil, in de-
stroyed forests, in the increasing toxicity of the world, and in annihilated
species. When property rights become absolute they are invariably
destructive, for then they are used to justify not only the abuse of things
of permanent value for the temporary benefit of legal owners, but also
the appropriation and abuse of things to which the would–be owners
have no rights at all, but which can belong only to the public or to the
entire community of living creatures: the atmosphere, the water cycle,
wilderness, ecosystems, the possibility of life.
This is made worse when great corporations are granted the status of
“persons,” who then can also become rugged individuals, insisting on
their right to do whatever they please with their property. Because of
the over–whelming wealth and influence of these “persons,” the elected
representatives and defenders of “the people of the United States” be-
come instead the representatives and defenders of the corporations.
It has become ever more clear that this sort of individualism has never
proposed or implied any protection of the rights of all individuals, but
instead has promoted a ferocious scramble in which more and more
of the rights of “the people” have been gathered into the ownership of
fewer and fewer ofthe greediest and most powerful “persons.”
I have described so far what most of us would identify as the rugged
individualism of the political right. Now let us have a look at the left. The
rugged individualism of the left believes that an individual's body is a
property belonging to that individual absolutely: The owners of bodies
may, by right, use them as they please, as if there were no God, no legit-
imate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This
supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of “sexual liberation”;
in the popular assumption that marriage has been “privatized” and so
made subordinate to the wishes of individuals; in the proposition that
the individual is “autonomous”; in the legitimation of abortion as birth
control in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one's
spouse, or even one's own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary
interest in the use one makes of one's body. And this too is tragic, for it
sets us “free” from responsibility and thus from the possibility of mean-
ing. It makes unintelligible the self–sacrifice that sent Thoreau to jail.
The comedy begins when these two rugged (or “autonomous”) individ-
ualisms confront each other. Conservative individualism strongly sup-
Rugged Individualism
ports “family values” and abominates lust. But it does not dissociate itself
from the profits accruing from the exercise of lust (and, in fact, ofthe other
six deadly sins), which it encourages in its advertisements. The “conserva-
tives” of our day understand pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony,
and sloth as virtues when they lead to profit or to political power. Only as
unprofitable or unauthorized personal indulgences do they rank as sins,
imperiling salvation of the soul, family values, and national security.
Liberal individualism, on the contrary, understands sin as a private matter.
It strongly supports protecting “the environment,” which is that part of the
world which surrounds, at a safe distance, the privately–owned body.
“The environment” does not include the economic landscapes of agricul-
ture and forestry or their human communities, and it does not include the
privately–owned bodies ofother people – all of which appear to have been
bequeathed in fee simple to the corporate individualists.
Conservative rugged individualists and liberal rugged individualists believe
alike that they should be “free” to get as much as they can of whatever they
want. Their major doctrinal difference is that they want (some of the time)
different sorts of things.
“Every man for himself” is a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a
burning night club, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of
lemmings. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of care–
taking, faith–keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language
is another precious resource that cannot be “privatized.”
In his worldThe hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.
“...In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.”
In his world
“...In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.”
A PraiseHis memories lived in the place
like fingers locked in the rock ledges
like roots. When he died
and his influence entered the air
I said, Let my mind be the earth
of his thought, let his kindness
go ahead of me. Though I do not escape
the history barbed in my flesh,
certain wise movements of his hands,
the turns of his speech
keep with me. His hope of peace
keeps with me in harsh days
the shell of his breath dimming away
three summers in the earth.
A Jonquil for Mary PennMary Penn was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton
get up and light the lamp and renew the fires. He dressed and went out with
the lantern to milk and feed and harness the team. It was early March, and
she could hear the wind blowing, rattling things. She threw the covers off and
sat up on the side of the bed, feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her
head lean down again onto her knees. But she got up, put on her dress and
sweater, and went to the kitchen.
Nor did she mention it when Elton came back in, bringing the milk, with
the smell of the barn cold in his clothes.
“How’re you this morning?” he asked her, giving her a pat as she strained
the milk.
And she said, not looking at him, for she did not want him to know how she
felt, “Just fine.”
He ate hungrily the eggs, sausage, and biscuits that she set in front of him,
twice emptying the glass that he replenished from a large pitcher of milk. She
loved to watch him eat–there was something curiously delicate in the way
he used his large hands–but this morning she busied herself about the kitch-
en, not looking at him, for she knew he was watching her. She had not even
set a place for herself.
“ You’re not
You’re not
”
he asked. ”
“Not very. I’ll eat something after while.”
He put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred rapidly with the spoon. Now
he lingered a little. He did not indulge himself often, but this was one of his
moments of leisure. He gave himself to his pleasures as concentratedly as to
his work. He was never partial about anything; he never felt two ways at the
same time. It was, she thought, a kind of childishness in him. When he was
happy, he was entirely happy, and he could be as entirely sad or angry. His
glooms were the darkest she had ever seen. He worked as a hungry dog ate,
and yet he could play at croquet or cards with the self–forgetful exuberance
of a little boy. It was for his concentratedness, she supposed, if such a thing
could be supposed about, that she loved him. That and her yen just to look at
him, for it was wonderful to her the way he was himself in his slightest look
or gesture. She did not understand him in everything he did, and yet she rec-
ognized him in everything he did. She had not been prepared–she was hardly
prepared yet–for the assent she had given to him.
Though he might loiter a moment over his coffee, the day, she knew, had al-
ready possessed him; its momentum was on him. When he rose from bed in
the morning, he stepped into the day’s work, impelled into it by the tension,
never apart from him, between what he wanted to do and what he could do.
The little hillside place that they had rented from his mother afforded him
no proper scope for his ability and desire. They always needed money, but,
day by day, they were getting by. Though the times were hard, they were not
going to be in want. But she knew his need to surround her with a margin of
pleasure and ease. This was his need, not hers; still, when he was not working
at home, he would be working, or looking for work, for pay.
This morning, delaying his own plowing, he was going to help Walter Cot-
he asked.
man plow his corn ground. She could feel the knowledge of what he had to
do tightening in him like a spring. She thought of him and Walter plowing,
starting in the early light, and the two teams leaning into the collars all day,
while the men walked in the opening furrows, and the steady wind shivered
the dry grass, shook the dead weeds, and rattled the treetops in the woods.
He stood and pushed in his chair. She came to be hugged as she knew he
wanted her to.
“It’s mean out,” he said. “Stay in today. Take some care of yourself.”
“You, too,” she said. “Have you got on plenty of clothes?”
“When I get ‘em all on, I will.” He was already wearing an extra shirt and a
pair of overalls over his corduroys. Now he put on a sweater, his work jacket,
his cap and gloves. He started out the door and then turned back. “Don’t
worry about the chores. I’ll be back in time to do everything.”
“All right,” she said.
He shut the door. And now the kitchen was a cell of still lamplight under the
long wind that passed without inflection over the ridges.
She cleared the table. She washed the few dishes he had dirtied and put
them away. The kitchen contained the table and four chairs, and the small
dish cabinet that they had bought, and the large iron cookstove that looked
more permanent than the house. The stove, along with the bed and a few
other sticks of furniture, had been there when they came.
She heard Elton go by with the team, heading out the lane. The daylight
would be coming now, though the windowpanes still reflected the lamp-
light. She took the broom from its corner by the back door and swept and
tidied up the room. They had been able to do nothing to improve the house,
which had never been a good one and had seen hard use. The wallpaper,
and probably the plaster behind, had cracked in places. The finish had worn
off the linoleum rugs near the doorways and around the stoves. But she kept
the house clean. She had made curtains. The curtains in the kitchen were
of the same blue and–white checkered gingham as the tablecloth. The bed
stands were orange crates for which she had made skirts of the same cloth.
Though the house was poor and hard to keep, she had made it neat and
homey. It was her first house, and usually it made her happy. But not now.
She was sick. At first it was a consolation to her to have the whole day to her-
self to be sick in. But by the time she got the kitchen straightened up, even
that small happiness had left her. She had a fever, she guessed, for every
motion she made seemed to carry her uneasily beyond the vertical. She had
a floaty feeling that made her unreal to herself. And finally, when she put the
broom away, she let herself sag down into one of the chairs at the table. She
ached. She was overpoweringly tired.
“The past is our definition. We may strive,
with good reason, to escape it, or to escape
what is bad in it, but we will escape it
only by adding something better to it.”
“The past is our definition. We may strive,
with good reason, to escape it, or to escape
what is bad in it, but we will escape it
only by adding something better to it.”Wendell Berry
I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,
their headsontes standing shoulder to shoulder
the bones imprisoned under them.
Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!
Pry open the vaults and the coffins
so the dead may nourish their graves
and go free, their acres traversed all summer
by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.
AMONGST
FARMERAMONGST
Familiar
The hand is risen from the earth,
the sap risen, leaf come back to branch,
bird to nest croch. Beans lift
their heads up in the row. The known
returns to be known again. Going
and coming back, it forms its curves,
a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.
The
Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco:
Pantheon Books, 1992
Fiction
Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992
Hannah Coulter, 2004
Jayber Crow, 2000
The Memory of Old Jack, 1974
Nathan Coulter, 1960
A Place on Earth, 1967
Remembering, 1988
That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004
Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered
Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994
The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986
A World Lost, 1996
Poetry
The Broken Ground, 1964
Clearing, 1977
Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982
The Country of Marriage, 1973
Entries, 1994
Farming: A Hand Book, 1970
Given: New Poems, 2005
Openings, 1968
A Part, 1980
Sabbaths: Poems, 1987
Sayings and Doings, 1975
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998
The Wheel, 1982
Essays
Another Turn of the Crank, 1996
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002
Citizenship Papers, 2003
A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972
This book was created by Michael Tarazi, a junior majoring in Communication
Design at Washington University in St. Louis. All writen material is credited to
Wendell Berry .
Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1987
Bibliography
Works Cited
Colophon
Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point,
2005
In this world
The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1981
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990
The Hidden Wound, 1970
Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987
Life Is a Miracle, 2000
The Long-Legged House, 2004
Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992
Standing by Words, 1983
The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977
What Are People For?, 1990