Requiem for Wendell Berry

By Buffy Hastings

I had plans to write about something else this month but then Wendell Berry died and that changed everything. I’m in the middle of reading his wonderful book on Harlan Hubbard (Hubbard and his wife were modern day Thoreaus who pulled off a Walden Pond like existence for more than forty years). There is much to discuss with Berry, more than I want to fit in here, but as I finish the Hubbard book and think of the body of work Berry produced I keep coming back to the essential human-ness of it all. 

It’s a rare day when I can get online and not see some AI slop. Even the little things have been turned over to computers---flyers for farm stands, library announcements. Can we not think for ourselves? Why are we incapable of hiring local graphic designers? Why justify data center development instead of circulating the work and money in our communities? They tell you right up front what it is all about: artificial. I don’t want artificial in my food, I don’t want artificial in my relationships, I don’t want it in my thinking. Artificial is not art. Keep in mind that the word art’s Latin root, ars, means “acquired skill.” It’s this acquired skill, in work and living, that Berry pursued with such beautiful force. His novels, poems and essays come back to this time and time again, that the slowing down of life, the focus on the small in front of us makes us think of the vast whole. The dilation, the creation, the wonder. Whether it is his novel Jayber Crow, his Sabbath poems or the remarkable The Unsettling of America, Berry forces the reader to look around and up close, to ask not only what can be made, but to ask us why we’re making it. The making, the doing, the living are human things, creations and modes and Berry spent a lifetime looking very closely at these creations and the hands and minds behind them. To read his work is to look with him. And it is to remind yourself that in a time of artificial pandering our humanity remains by remaining human, by doing human work.

I love this, the opening to chapter five of The Unsettling of America:

“It is impossible to divorce the question of what we do from the question of where we are---or, rather, where we think we are. That no sane creature befouls its own nest is accepted as generally true. What we conceive to be our nest, and where we think it is, are therefore questions of the greatest importance.”

That no sane creature befouls its own nest… I question our sanity then. To look at Sourland Mountain and want to rip an acre out of it for a hotel, to flatten 20 acres on Hewitt Road and cause widespread runoff flooding, to want to run a pipeline across it, this befouling is insane indeed. But our minds are nests as well, homes and dwellings and laboratories for self. We befoul our minds in countless ways, AI is just one of them. A renewed focus on work, place and local economy opens up the possibilities of being human while keeping us grounded in the common humanity binding us all. It will keep us sane. It will clean places in need of cleaning and, ideally, it will help us from befouling them in the first place. Spend some time with Berry’s books, they’ll lead you down great roads.