One: A Selection from Wendell Berry

One A Selection from Wendell Berry

A Cycle Through Nature

We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the earth or submit to such an involvement in our destruc-tiveness that the earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed. And we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying. (46)

Berry’s work is an ongoing exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land, and his writing constitutes, as Gary Tolliver has said, one man’s “continuing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of harmony with the natural world” (13). To proponents of modern “progress,” Berry’s ideas must seem regressive, unrealistic, radical. But no advice could be more needed and more practical, if we are to progress.

Wendell Berry

Meditation in the Spring Rain

In the April rain I climed up to drinkof the lives water leaping off the hill,white over the rocks. Where the mossy rootof a sycamore cups the flow, I drankand saw the branches feathered with green.The thickets, I said, send up their praiseat dawn. Was that what I meant I meantmy words to have the heft and grace, the flightand weight of the very hill, its liferising-or was it some old exultationthat abides with me? We’ll not soon escapethe faith of our fathers no more thancrazy old Mrs. Gaines, whom my grandmotherremembers standing balanced wighty years agoatop a fence in Port Royal, Kentucky,singin: “One Lord, one Faith, and one Cornbread.” They had a cage built for herin a room, “nearly as big as the room, notcramped up,” and when she grew wildthey kept her there. But mostly she went freein the town, and they allowed the childrento go for walks with her. She strayed oncebeyond where they thought she went, was lostto them, “and they had an aweful timefinding her.” For her, to be freewas only to be lost. What is it about herthat draws me on, so that my mind becomes a childto follow after her? An old womanwhen my grandmother was a girl, she must have seen

the virgin forest standing here, the amplitudeof our beginning, of which no speechremains. Out of the town’s lost history,buried in minds long buried, she has come,brought back by a memory near death. I see herin her dusky clothes, hair uncombed, the childreninto the turning and changingcircle of all lovers. On this heightour labor changes into flight.

The Supplanting

Where the road came, no longer bearing men,but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodilsrose in spring among the wild vines to be domesticand to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle with white bloom. For a while in the years ofits wilderness a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor therein the cold nights. And then I came, and set fireto the remnants ofhouse and shed, and let timehurry in the flame. I fired it so that allwould burn, and watched the blaze settle on the wastelike a shawl. I knew those old ones departedthen, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me something that would not bear my name-something that bears usthrough the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

One Season

The Supplanting

Where the road came, no longer bearing men,but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodilsrose in spring among the wild vines to be domesticand to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle with white bloom. For a while in the years ofits wilderness a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor therein the cold nights. And then I came, and set fireto the remnants ofhouse and shed, and let timehurry in the flame. I fired it so that allwould burn, and watched the blaze settle on the wastelike a shawl. I knew those old ones departedthen, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me something that would not bear my name-something that bears usthrough the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

One Season

Sowing

In the stilled place that once was a road going downfrom the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grewa house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckleand then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavywith seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Betweenhistory’s death upon the place and the trees that would have comeI claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

One Day

One Day

Mary Penn was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton get up and light the lamp and renew the fires. He dressed and went out with the lantern to milk and feed and harness the team. It was early March, and she could hear the wind blowing, rattling things. She threw the covers off and sat up on the side of the bed, feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her head lean down again onto her knees. But she got up, put on her dress and sweater, and went to the kitchen.

Nor did she mention it when Elton came back in, bringing the milk, with the smell of the barn cold in

A Jonquil for Mary Penn (Selection)

Mary Penn was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton get up and light the lamp and renew the fires. He dressed and went out with the lantern to milk and feed and harness the team. It was early March, and she could hear the wind blowing, rattling things. She threw the covers off and sat up on the side of the bed, feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her head lean down again onto her knees. But she got up, put on her dress and sweater, and went to the kitchen.

Nor did she mention it when Elton came back in, bringing the milk, with the smell of the barn cold in

A Jonquil for Mary Penn (Selection)

One Day

“How’re you this morning?” he asked her, giving her a pat as she strained the milk.

And she said, not looking at him, for she did not want him to know how she felt, “Just fine.”

“You’re not hungry?” he asked.

“Not very. I’ll eat something after while.”

He started out the door and then turned back. “Don’t worry about the chores. I’ll be back in time to do everything.”

She was sick. At first it was a conso-lation to her to have the whole day to herself to be sick in. But by the time she got the kitchen straight-ened up, even that small happiness had left her. She had a fever, she guessed, for every motion she made seemed to carry her uneasily beyond the vertical. She had a floaty feeling that made her unreal to herself. And

“She was sick and alone.”

One Day

finally, when she put the broom away, she let herself sag down into one of the chairs at the table. She ached. She was overpoweringly tired.

She was sick and alone. And perhaps the sorrow that she felt for herself was not altogether unjustified.

The fire had burned low in the stove. Though she still wore her coat, she was chilled again and shaking. For a long time, perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now misery alerted her again to the room. The wind ranted and sucked at the house’s comers. She could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody off in the distance were shaking a great rug. She felt, not a draft, but the whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against her. She went into the other room, but the fire there also needed building up. She could not bring herself to do it. She was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying down. Standing near the stove, she undressed, put on her nightgown again, and went to bed.

When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Though the wind was still blowing hard, the room was full of sunlight. The lamp on the narrow mantelshelf behind the stove was filled and clean, its chimney gleaming, and so was the one on the stand by the bed. Josie Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she had draped over her lap.

And so Mary knew all the story of her day. Elton, going by Josie Tom’s in the half-light, had stopped and called.

She could hear his voice, raised to carry through the wind:

“Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over to Walter’s to plow.”

So he had known. He had thought of her. He had told Josie Tom.

Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom raised her head and smiled. “Well, are you awake? Are you all right?”

One Day

One Day

One World

Newspaper editorials deplore such human-caused degradations of the oceans as the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone,” and reporters describe practices like “mountain removal” mining in eastern Kentucky. Some day we may finally understand the connections.

The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on the health of small streams; the health ofsmall streams depends on the health of their watersheds. The health of the water is exactly the same as the health of the land; the health ofsmall places is exactly the same as the health of large places. As we know, disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in force everywhere, infections move.

We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt for small places and small streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they are understood collectively as large destructions. Excessive nutrient run off from farms and animal factories in the Mississippi water-shed has caused, in the Gulf of Mexico, a hypoxic or “dead zone” of five or six thousand square miles. In forty-odd years, strip mining in the Appalachian coal fields, culminat-ing in mountain removal, has gone far toward the destruc-tion ofa whole region, with untold damage to the region’s people, to watersheds, and to the waters downstream.

There is not a more exemplary history ofour contempt for small places than that of Eastern Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many absentee corporate shareholders

and left the region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry representatives are now defending mountain removal and its attendant damage to forests, streams, wells, dwellings, roads, and community life by saying that in “10, 15, 20 years” the land will be restored, and that such mining has “created the [level] land” needed for further industrial development.

But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the watershed. These things are not to be restored in ten or twenty years, or in ten or twenty hundred years. As for the manufacture of level places for industrial development, the supply has already far exceed-ed any foreseeable demand. And the devastation continues.

The contradictions in the state’s effort “to balance the competing interests” were stated as follows by Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian Commission: “If you don’t have mining, you don’t have an economy, and if you don’t have an economy you don’t have a way for the people to live. But ifyou don’t have environmental quality, you won’t create the kind of place where people want to live.”

Yes. And if the clearly foreseeable result is a region of flat industrial sites where nobody wants to live, we need a better economy.

Contempt for Small Places:

Rain

It is a day of the earth’s renewing without making any man’s doing or help.Though I have fields I do not go out to work in them. Though I have crops standing in rows I do not go out to ook st them or gather what has ripened or how the weeds from the balks.Though I have animals I stay dry in the house while they graze in the wet.Though I have buildings they stand closed under their roofs.Though I have fences they go without me.My life stands in place, covered, like a hayrick or a mushroom.

One

Within the circles of ourlives we dance the circles of the years, the circles of the seasonswithin the circles of the years,the cycles ofthe moon within the circles of the seasons, the circles of our reasonswithin the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go, changed, changing. Handsjoin, unjoin in love and fear, grief and joy. The circles turn, each giving into each, into all. Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.In the hold of hands and eyes we turn in pairs, that joining joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone, out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

Song (4)for Guy Davenport

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York andSan Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992

Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987

Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005

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