“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.”
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 -
When I was in high school I went on a winter backpacking trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, cross country skiing and pulling a sled with a handful of classmates. I brought a single very tightly printed out paper with my favorite passages and quotes. I don't remember which Wendell Berry quote I took with me into the wilds, but it might have included this favorite:
“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.”
And because Vic already shared that one, here's a bonus :)
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
The Dignity of Dependence reminded me so much of Berry's essay "Health Is Membership." I think it's in The Art of Commonplace, which a group of friends and I discussed via Zoom starting in 2020. It was one of the best book clubs; each essay was so rich.
Not only my favorite Wendell Berry quote but probably my favorite quote in general. I first read Hannah Coulter in 2020 and over the past year read some of his nonfiction. I just read Jayber Crow which is also stunning!
“This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed. So close to the end now, what do I look forward to? ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’”
There is one line from a Sabbath poem that is essentially my whole philosophy of technology summed up in nine words: "We live the given life, and not the planned." Life is first and foremost a gift to be received with gratitude and wonder in the spirit of joyful stewardship, rather than a field of raw material for us to exploit, manage, and master. I learned this from Berry as much as from Illich.
I'm not familiar with most of Berry's writing, but today I read his essay "Think Little", and I appreciated this part:
"A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word."
It’s difficult to find a “quote” because Berry’s articles often pull in multiple threads that aren’t always obviously connected, but he finds the connections. He reminds me of Pope Francis in that way.
For example, from “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”:
“The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community.”
and
“Starting with economic brutality, we have arrived at sexual brutality. Those who affirm the one and deplore the other will have to explain how we might logically have arrived anywhere else.”
"Starting with economic brutality, we have arrived at sexual brutality. Those who affirm the one and deplore the other will have to explain how we might logically have arrived anywhere else.”
I would ask when we "arrived" at sexual brutality. Anyone who has bothered to actually read ancient writings will find that sexual brutality has been around for a *very* long time.
“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.”
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.
I love Berry the novelist and Berry the poet, but we disrespectfully bowdlerize him if we omit Berry the essayist.
Everyone should read The Unsettling of America.
Agreed!!
The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry
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 children's 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.
from Openings: Poems (1968)
When I was in high school I went on a winter backpacking trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, cross country skiing and pulling a sled with a handful of classmates. I brought a single very tightly printed out paper with my favorite passages and quotes. I don't remember which Wendell Berry quote I took with me into the wilds, but it might have included this favorite:
“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.”
And because Vic already shared that one, here's a bonus :)
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
I love his poem “The Vacation.” I think about it all the time!
RIP Wendell. Legend.
The Dignity of Dependence reminded me so much of Berry's essay "Health Is Membership." I think it's in The Art of Commonplace, which a group of friends and I discussed via Zoom starting in 2020. It was one of the best book clubs; each essay was so rich.
Not only my favorite Wendell Berry quote but probably my favorite quote in general. I first read Hannah Coulter in 2020 and over the past year read some of his nonfiction. I just read Jayber Crow which is also stunning!
“This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed. So close to the end now, what do I look forward to? ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’”
There is one line from a Sabbath poem that is essentially my whole philosophy of technology summed up in nine words: "We live the given life, and not the planned." Life is first and foremost a gift to be received with gratitude and wonder in the spirit of joyful stewardship, rather than a field of raw material for us to exploit, manage, and master. I learned this from Berry as much as from Illich.
I'm not familiar with most of Berry's writing, but today I read his essay "Think Little", and I appreciated this part:
"A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word."
https://berrycenter.org/2017/03/26/think-little-wendell-berry/
A favorite quote that is almost my personal motto: "Every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.”
It’s difficult to find a “quote” because Berry’s articles often pull in multiple threads that aren’t always obviously connected, but he finds the connections. He reminds me of Pope Francis in that way.
For example, from “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”:
“The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community.”
and
“Starting with economic brutality, we have arrived at sexual brutality. Those who affirm the one and deplore the other will have to explain how we might logically have arrived anywhere else.”
"Starting with economic brutality, we have arrived at sexual brutality. Those who affirm the one and deplore the other will have to explain how we might logically have arrived anywhere else.”
I would ask when we "arrived" at sexual brutality. Anyone who has bothered to actually read ancient writings will find that sexual brutality has been around for a *very* long time.
Like I said, it’s difficult to “quote” Wendell Berry; I think he needs more context.
"Solving for Pattern", has been the guiding methodology of my career since first read in the late 90s