I’d like to just open a thread in memoriam for Wendell Berry. I’ve read three Berry books so far: Hannah Coulter, Marce Catlett, and Jayber Crow. (And my husband is swinging by the library to pick up my hold on Remembering today).
I feel like I came to Berry late (a lot of my friends had all been reading him and recommending him to me) so it was exciting when Marce Catlett came out last year. It was the only time I was reading a Berry novel for the first time… and everyone else was, too. We invited friends over to our house for a book club.
I couldn’t ask for a better summary of the themes of The Dignity of Dependence than this from Wendell Berry (emphasis added):
And so they took their place in the local life and economy of Andy’s, and soon enough Flora’s and their children’s, home country. They came into the local life and economy that Andy’s father had done much to preserve. They were at home with their neighbors in their neighborhood.
Andy began swapping work with people, now his neighbors, he had worked with starting in his boyhood: Elton and Mary Penn, Arthur and Martin Rowanberry, Pascal and Sudie Rowanberry Sowers. They followed the only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help. By extension of their one rule, there was no “settling up.” All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody’s need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.
Our frailty is our entry ticket to what Berry calls the Membership.
We can build lasting community, with horizontal solidarity among peers and vertical solidarity between generations because we will never run out of our need for each other.
I’ll be gathering people together again soon enough (two families coming over on successive days this weekend, and then we go a-visiting ourselves on Monday). Next weekend, we host people to watch Come from Away. (If you know me in real life, feel free to DM for details). I’d like to get people together for a Berry literary wake, but because we already have a very full community life, it will take a little bit to find a slot in our calendar.
In the mean time, while I’m waiting to say “Yes” to that idea, I’m saying “No” to one thing:
One other not-yet Yes for us is that we’ve marked our calendar for “Sticker’s Day” on the anniversary of our move to our neighborhood. (Directly inspired by this essay from James Matthew Wilson). We want to do something annually to mark our choice to be rooted where we are. (Full disclosure, I have intended this for the last two years without pulling it off, but we’ll see).
I married a Kentuckian, not that I understood that at the time what that would mean. I got a taste of it when we wandered by an Anarchist bookshop with a sale table deep in West Philly one evening before our wedding. I can't even tell you where it is, just that they had a single book which we bought (or ever would buy), Hannah Coulter. My husband hadn't read any of Wendell Berry but had heard of him. I hadn't thought of any literature coming from Kentucky at all. We finished it in a park later that summer, or rather I did, because he cried as I don't think he often has still, at reading the death of Nathan Coulter and remembering his grandmother, who died before we met, and missing his grandfarher, who'd live long enough to be loved by our children but would move to his hometown after fifty years in the city, a town not much different from Port William.
And I saw what our life would be, or has become since, because while I don't have great uncles who grew watermelons, fought in World War II, and were named Homer and Virgil, my children do. And I'm grateful to Wendell Berry and first showing me that possiblity in literature before I had to face it in life, before I would choose to move to Kentucky with him, where I'd not grown up ever expecting to be but my children are from.
When we were young and couldn't really afford it, we got a lithograph of Manifesto: the Mad Farmer's Liberation Front. I still have trouble quoting just a part of it because everyone should read it all but -
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute....
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”