From Wendell Berry’s May 2022 Sabbath poem: But the old man knows, contrarily, that this world was made by love. He knows it because that love came to him one time in the person of a girl and it abides in the girl’s great-grandmotherhood. He knows the world was made by love because of his experience of faithful love. As below, so above–an inversion of the Hermetic saying.
Marco Ament recently wrote something I have thought so many times over the years: If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside? … Maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything It also reminds me of this passage from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole.
While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row
Wendell Berry
‘Chance’ is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, ‘By chance, of course!’ As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by the logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.
“Love Your Farmers Market? Thank Wendell Berry”. Berry’s influence is not limited to farmers markets. To wit: Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Slow Food, farm to table, regenerative agriculture, localism of various types. Some he directly influenced; some he gave language to.
It is heartening to see all the people writing remembrances of Wendell Berry and posting quotes from his work. But the question presses forward: what are we going to do in response to such a life? Words alone are empty.
It’s good to hear, from the people who knew him best, that your hero was a truly good man.
Well what can I say? No one apart from immediate family has shaped me more than Wendell Berry. He’s been a part of my life for over twenty years and, for the last several, I’ve thought about him nearly every day. He did a lifetime’s worth of good work, the public face of which he left for our bookshelves. What worked in him still works in us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Another good thing today: it’s Wendell Berry’s 92nd birthday. Happy birthday, uncle Wendell!
🚨 New Wendell Berry essay collection alert 🚨
From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over the fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes.