This morning, pumping gas at the station on the edge of our neighborhood, I felt again what I’ve sometimes felt over the past few years as I’ve turned toward my particular place, and learned to love it warts and all. One of Wendell Berry’s phrases came to mind: “it all turns on affection”:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbours, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighbourly, kind, and conserving economy.

“Can Wendell Berry save us from Peter Thiel?” The Earth Loving Faithful against the End Times Fascists.

Good interview with Mary Berry, daughter of Wendell Berry and executive director of the Berry Center:

To my mind, the agrarian ideal—the idea that we live in a land ethic, that what’s good for the health of the land is good for us—all that is true, it turns out. So, we tell our students here, If you want to farm, you’re going to have to learn to take absolute pleasure in the place that you are. I think if you can learn to be satisfied and fascinated by the place where you are, contentment is possible, and from contentment, it seems to me, joy is then possible.

A new Port William novel by Wendell Berry is coming this year! If you do order it, consider ordering it through the Berry Center and support the good work they’re doing there. Also, I’ve just realized I didn’t write about my visit there last week. I’ll fix that soon. 📚

If all goes as planned, I’ll be visiting the (Wendell) Berry Center in Kentucky on Friday. I’ll probably also visit Port Royal, his hometown and the inspiration for the fictional Port William.

Wendell Berry:

This book, like several others I have written, is intended as a part of a public conversation about the relationship of our lives, and of our communal and economic life, to the lands we live from. That no such public conversation exists presently, or has existed for the last sixty or seventy years, has never been, and is not now, an obstacle to my “contribution.”

Wendell Berry’s characterization of agrarianism (from his introduction to The Art of Loading Brush):

1. An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land, and in all the details of the good husbandry of plants and animals.
2. An informed and conscientious submission to nature, or to Nature, and her laws of conservation, frugality, fullness or completeness, and diversity.
3. The wish, the felt need, to have and to belong to a place of one’s own as the only secure source of sustenance and independence. (The freed slaves who pled for “forty acres and a mule” were more urgently and practically agrarian than the “Twelve [white] Southerners.")
4. From that to a persuasion in favor of economic democracy, a preference for enough over too much.
5. Fear and contempt of waste of every kind and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion. Waste is understood as human folly, an insult to nature, a sin against the given world and its life.
6. From that to a preference for saving rather than spending as the basis of the economy of a household or a government.
7. An assumption of the need for a subsistence or household economy, so as to live so far as possible from one’s place.
8. An acknowledged need for neighbors and a willingness to be a neighbor. This comes from proof by experience that no person or family or place can live alone.
9. A living sense of the need for continuity of family and community life in place, which is to say the need for the survival of local culture and thus of the safekeeping of local memory and local nature.
10. Respect for work and (as self-respect) for good work. This implies an understanding of one’s life’s work as a vocation and a privilege, as opposed to a “job” and a vacation.
11. A lively suspicion of anything new. This contradicts the ethos of consumerism and the cult of celebrity. It is not inherently cranky or unreasonable.

More from Uncle Wendell:

I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgement. And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.

Wendell Berry, A World Lost:

However we may miss and mourn the dead, we really give little deference to death. “Death,” a friend of mine said as he approached it himself, “is a convention … not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.” The dead remain in thought as much alive as they ever were, and yet increased in stature and grown remarkably near. The older I have got and the better acquainted among the dead, the plainer it has become to me that I live in the company of immortals.