Berry in his own words

We had some words here about Wendell Berry a few weeks ago. In an interview nicely conducted by Lauren Wilcox in World Ark, a publication of the Heifer Project, Berry himself gives what I take to be a good short summary of his stance (this issue's not on line yet):

It's important at least that we understand our economic relation to the world, the way we live from it, the way we do or don't take care of it. I think the conservation movement unwittingly helped to drive a wedge between us and our land by implying that we could live most of our lives in circumstances that don't quite suit us -- doing work that doesn't suit us, work that makes us say, Thank God it's Friday -- and then somehow, on vacation, go to a national park and reconnect with the natural world. But of course that's not a connection. ...

You don't have to go to the Rocky Mountains to confront nature, to learn from it and ask the necessary questions. If you go to a good farm that has been properly and gracefully fitted into a place, then you can see that real questions about the terms on which we live have been asked, and answered.

Paleos try to annex Wendell Berry

Scott Richert represents the paleo kind of conservatives, those who realize that capitalism is not their friend. Writing in The University Bookman (h/t Jameson Campaigne), he gives a friendly review to Eric Freyfogle (a University of Illinois law professor who has long argued that the environmental crisis requires a rethinking of private property rights in a more communal direction) and to a collection of essays about the Kentucky agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry.

Berry has long escaped partisan categorization (over the years he's been featured in Mother Jones and Mother Earth News) and the paleos' clumsy efforts to appropriate him as some kind of conservative Catholic are a stretch that would be funny if Richert weren't so invincibly earnest. There seems to be a boom in books by and about Berry these days, and I'll be interested to see if any of them can take him on his own idiosyncratic terms, horse farming and all, without trying to assimilate him into traditions (like Catholicism) that are many thousands of years younger than his agrarianism.

Poetry Friday

On my last day at the Reader, I yield the floor to fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, from The Country of Marriage (buy it, you won't be sorry). Years ago, this one resided on the wall of our downstate outhouse, which looked out on just such a tree. Don't read it too fast.

THE OLD ELM TREE BY THE RIVER

Shrugging in the flight of its leaves,
it is dying. Death is slowly
standing up in its trunk and branches
like a camouflaged hunter. In the night
I am wakened by one of its branches
crashing down, heavy as a wall, and then
lie sleepless, the world changed.
That is a life I know the country by.
Mine is a life I know the country by.
Willing to live and die, we stand here,
timely and at home, neighborly as two men.
Our place is changing in us as we stand,
and we hold up the weight that will bring us down.
In us the land enacts its history.
When we stood it was beneath us, and was
the strength by which we held to it
and stood, the daylight over it
a mighty blessing we cannot bear for long.