Gardening

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at a store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and re-use its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people.

— Wendell Berry, “Think Little”, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural (1972)

The full text can be found here.

The Thing Being Made in a University Is Humanity

The thing being made in a university is humanity. Given the current influence of universities, this is merely inevitable. But what universities, at least the public-supported ones, are mandated to make or to help to make is human beings in the fullest sense of those words — not just trained workers or knowlegeable citizens but responsible heirs and members of human culture. If the proper work of the university is only to equip people to fulfill private ambitions, then how do we justify public support? If it is only to prepare citizens to fulfill public responsibilities, then how do we justify the teaching of arts and sciences? The common denominator has to be larger than either career preparation or preparation for citizenship. Underlying the idea of a university – the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines — is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good — that is, a fully developed — human being. This, as I understand it, is the definition of the name university.

— Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the University” (1984), Home Economics: Fourteen Essays (1987)

An Ultimate Value, Enduring and Alive

As it was, [my father] not only kept me within the reach and the influence of my native and ancestral ground, he gave me every encouragement, up to and including insistence, to learn everything I could about it. He talked and contrived endlessly to the effect that I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of man’s attention and care. With what seems to me to have been, in the face of prevailing fashion and opinion, remarkable insight and foresight, he insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing — and saying again and again — that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education.

― Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound (1970)

The full text can be found here.

Time and Memory

Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory.  Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.  Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me.  That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in.  Finally it wears in.  Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to.

— musings of “Jayber Crow”, in Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William membership, as Written by Himself: a Novel (2000)

The Kingdom of God

Some time ago, in a conversation with Wes Jackson in which we were laboring to define the causes of the modern ruination of farmland, we finally got around to the money economy. I said that an economy based on energy would be more benign because it would be more comprehensive.

Wes would not agree. “An energy economy still wouldn’t be comprehensive enough.”

“Well,” I said, “then what kind of economy would be comprehensive enough?”

He hesitated a moment, and then, grinning, said, “The Kingdom of God.”

— Wendell Berry, “Two Economies”, Home Economics

Knowing Nature

Knowing this valley, once one has started to know it, is clearly no casual  matter.  Like all country places, it is both complex and reticent.  It cannot be understood by passing through.  It does not, like Old Faithful, gush up its inwards on schedule so as not to delay the hurrying traveler.  Its wonders are commonplace and shy.  Knowing them is an endless labor and, if one can willingly expend the labor, an endless pleasure.

I am not sure how one would judge a valley or compare it to any other.  I guess that this one must be as attractive as most.  To me, because I have been its inhabitant and intimate, it is the most attractive of all.  I know that among all the other lives it holds and promises there is the possibility of rich hours and days and lives for people.

— Wendell Berry, “The Nature Consumers”, in The Long-Legged House

Citizenship

It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs to be governed.

— Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the Future”, in The Long-Legged House (1969)

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

— Wendell Berry, “To Know the Dark”

This fierce willingness to see everything is necessary to be fully present within the fulness of reality. It is necessary so that we do not wither in the face of confrontation. We must see suffering if we are to soothe wounds. And we must recognize cruelty that we may protect the vulnerable. To summon strength, we must recognize that conditions require strength. To express kindness and connection, we must see clearly who has been labeled an outsider.

— Ivan M. Granger, “Wendell Berry — To Know the Dark” posted on “Poetry Chaikhana Blog” (www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2017/02/01/wendell-berry-to-know-the-dark/)

Ownership

Ownership [of the hill] presumes that only man lives in time, and that the hill is merely present, merely a place. But the poet who lives, heeded or not, within the owner knows that the hill is also taking place. It is as alive as its owner. The two lives go side by side in time together, and ultimately they are the same.

— Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill”, in The Long-Legged House