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.
—Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
The NYT this evening is reporting the death of Kentucky sage Wendell Berry at his home in Henry County. Earlier this year, I focused on reading his major essay collections and two of his novels.
Berry stridently opposed agribusiness, advocating for family farmers and the sustaining of local communities. He refrained from using farm machinery and chemical fertilizers. Horses and mules, they did the plowing.
Berry had his stubborn ways, nearly Amish in his habits. He wrote his many books in pencil on a yellow legal pad, his wife Tanya typing them up for publishers. He never owned a computer or even a television. His clock was set by sunrise and sunset. In simplicity, he found a happiness that possessions could not give.
He had much to teach us about a way of life that yielded contentment through resourcefulness and the social intimacy of small-town America—a way of life lamentably vanishing in the throes of urbanization, the decline of the family farm, the corporate erosion of local industries, and the flight of young people to the cities.
I remember the America he loved: the small town with its eccentric characters; schoolmates, many from family farms; baseball on the town common; a trip to the big city a major happening; the doctor, with his little black bag, coming to the house; a trip to the barber, a conversation. Families seemed stationary, one generation succeeding another. Faces changed. The surnames remained. This is the America Wendell wrote about.
When hard times came, as inevitably they do, we were there for each other, binding up the wounds. We knew our heroes, and we gladly paid them tribute.
I miss that America. And I will miss Wendell.
He tried to teach us, but we didn’t listen. A voice is silenced, but his wisdom hovers.
Rest peacefully, Wendell, in the dark Kentucky soil you so loved.
RJ
Brimmings: up from the well 