Wendell Berry

When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird.

by Wendell Berry

Wendell BerrySelected Works by

Berry’s work is an ongoing exploration of man’s use of and relationship

to the land and his writing constitues, as Gary Tolliver has said, one man’s

“continuing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of harmony

with the natural world”. 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.

Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching, his home and family,

and all that each involves are extraordinarily integrated. He understands

his writing as an attempt to elucideate certain connections, primarily the

interrelaionships and interdependencies of man and that natural world.

Berry’s Life

1

thinking of… the spring heavy

with official meaningless deaths.”

“In the night I lay awake,

As spring begins the river rises,

filling like the sorrow of nations

-uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains,

the debris of kitchens, all passing

seaward. At dawn snow began to fall.

The ducks, moving north, pass

like shadows through the falling white.

The jonquils, halfopen, bend down with its weight.

The plow freezes in the furrow.

In the night I lay awake, thinking

of the river rising, the spring heavy

with official meaningless deaths.

March 22, 1968

3

thinking of… the spring heavy

with official meaningless deaths.”

“In the night I lay awake,

We are destroying our country - I mean our country itself, our land. This is

a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to

continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will

not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary.

It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of

course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed?

Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all-by

proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians-

be participating in its destruction?

Since the beginning of the conservation effort, conservationists have

too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the

people. This has begun to change, but we will have to reckon with the old

assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness

areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes and the people

who use them. They are going to have to address issues of economy, which

is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities

where we do our work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

Old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and

who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good

because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted

the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary,

were built by people who take no pride in the place, see no value in lives

an excerpt fromCompromise, Hell!

4

“But we have powerful polticial opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy

is justified by freedom and profit.”

lived there. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be

siphoned out of it to more fortunate places-that is, to the wealthier suburbs

of the larger cities.

There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction.

Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by

false advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to

destroy local, regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital

supplies such as food and textiles. It is impossible to understand, let alone

justify, a government’s willingness to allow the human sources of necessary

goods to be destroyed by the “freedom” of this corporate anarchy. It is

equally impossible to understand how a government can permit, and even

subsidize, the destruction of the land or of the land’s productivity.

It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that

should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large

number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is

wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who

insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit.

And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts

of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time-like the

famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be eaten all at once.

So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end

with hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning:

Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use

5

“But we have powerful polticial opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy

is justified by freedom and profit.”

that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy.

Humans don’t have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People

can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party,

can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of

our land’s exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems, and I will

offer a short list of practical suggestions.

We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by

“bringing in industry.” Every state government appears to be scheming

to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by “tax incentives”

and other squanderings ofthe people’s money. We ought to suspend that

practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the

best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our

communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing

them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.

And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land

for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction

of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too

tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country’s defense, become

the agents of our country’s destroyers, compromising on its ruin. And so

I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patnot and an

indomitable foe of strip mining, the late Joe Begley of Blackey:

“Compromise, hell!”

6

The New Roof

On the housetop, the floor of the boundless

where birds and storms fly and disappear,

and the valley opened over our heads, a leap

of clarity between the hills, we spent five days

in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on

the new, letting the sun touch for once

in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then

securing the house again in its shelter and shade.

Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history

has come between me and the sky.

7

Beechum

JackBeechum

b. 1860d.1952

RuthLightwood

b.1871d. September 1935

HamiltonBeechum

d. June 1864

MathewBeechum

d. October 1864

NancyBeechumb. 1845

BenFeltnerb. 1840

d. July 1912

ClaraBeechum

GladstonPettit

MatFeltnerb. 1884d. 1965

MargaretFenleyb. 1885d. 1969

Rebecca

Wheeler

AndrewWheeler

JamesWheeler

LeonidasWheeler

(“Uncle Peach:)

Lizzie DorieWheelerb. 1870d. 1947

MarcellusCatlettb. 1864d. 1946

Thelmab. 1899

AndrewCatlettb. 1893d. 1944

Judithd. 1962

WheelerCatlettb. 1900d. 1992

BessFeltnerb. 1908d. 1998

Flora AndrewCatlettb. 1934

HenryCatlettb. 1936

VirgilCatlettb. 1964

BettyCatlett

MarcusSettlemeyer

MargaretFeltner

b. May 17, 1945

Virgil FeltnerSettlemeyer

b. 1976

Port William Family Tree

Feltner

CoulterSimon Feltnerb. 1784 in Virginia

d. 1858

JeffersonFeltner

LetitiaMcGown

NathanCoulter

Jonas ThomassonCoulter

MasonCatlett

ElizabethCoulter

NoahCoulter

MaryCoulter

Parthenia B.b. 1835d.1917

George WashingtonCoulterb. 1826d. 1889

ErnestFinleyb. 1894d. 1945

WhitHumston

WillCatlett

Thad Coulter DavidCoulterd. 1938

ZelmaHumston

AbnerCoulter

Martha ElizabethCoulterb. 1895

JarratCoulterb. 1891d. 1965

BurleyCoulterb. 1895d. 1977

Kate HelenBranchd. 1950

VirgilFeltnerb. 1915d. 1945

Hannahb. 1922

NathanCoulterb. 1924d. 2000

TomCoulterb. 1922d. 1943

Lydab. 1933

DannyBranchb. 1932

Mathew BurleyCoulterb. 1950

CakebCoulterb. 1952

WillBranchb. 1955

RoyalBranch

CoulterBranch

FountBranch

ReubenBranch

RachelBranch

RosieBranch

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

his clothes.

“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 put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred

rapidly with the spoon. He did not indulge himself

often, but this was one of his moments of leisure.

Mary Penn was sick,

“A Jonquil for Mary Penn”an excerpt from

10

“It was for his concentratedness… that she loved him.”

“It was for his concentratedness… that she loved him.”

He gave himself to his pleasures as concentratedly

as to his work. He was never partial about anything;

he never felt two ways at the same time. It was, she

thought, a kind of childishness in him. When he was

happy, he was entirely happy, and he could be as

entirely sad or angry. His glooms were the darkest

she had ever seen. It was for his concentratedness,

she supposed, if such a thing could be supposed

about, that she loved him. That and her yen just to

look at him, for it was wonderful to her the way he

was himself in his slightest look or gesture. She did

not understand him in everything he did, and yet she

recognized him in everything he did. She had not

been prepared—she was hardly prepared yet—for the

assent she had given to him.

He stood and pushed in his chair. She came to be

hugged as she knew he wanted her to. 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 took the broom from its corner by the back door

and swept and tidied up the room. They had been

able to do nothing to improve the house. But she kept

11

the house clean. She had made curtains. The bed

stands were orange crates for which she had made

skirts of the same cloth. Though the house was poor

and hard to keep, she had made it neat and homey.

It was her first house, and usually it made her happy.

But not now.

She was sick. 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 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 had rarely been sick and never since she married.

And now she did something else that was unlike her:

she allowed herself to feel sorry for herself.

She remembered that she and Elton had quarreled the

night before-about what. She remembered the heavy,

mostly silent force of his anger. It had been only

another of those tumultuous darknesses that came

over him as suddenly and sometimes as unaccountably

as a July storm. She was miserable, she told herself.

She was sick and alone. And perhaps the sorrow that

she felt for herself was not altogether unjustified.

She and Elton had married a year and a half earlier,

when she was seventeen and he eighteen. She had

never seen anybody like him. He had a wild way of

rejoicing, like a healthy child, singing songs, joking,

driving his old car as if he were drunk and the road

not wide enough. He could make her weak with

laughing at him. And yet he was already a man as

few men were. He had been making his own living

since he was fourteen, when he had quit school. His

father had been dead by then for five years. When a

neighbor had offered him crop ground, room, and

wages, he had taken charge of himself and, though

he was still a boy, he had become a man. He wanted,

he said, to have to say thank you to nobody. Or to

nobody but her. He would be glad, he said with a

12

“She could have put her hand into

his and walked right off the edge

of the world.

Which, in a way,is what she did.”

His memories lived in the place

like fingers locked in the rock ledges

like roots. When he died

and his influence entered the air

I said, Let my mind be the earth

of his thought, let his kindness

go ahead ofme. Though I do not escape

the history barbed in my flesh,

certain wise movements of his hands,

the turns of his speech

keep with me. His hope of peace

keeps with me in harsh days,

the shell of his breath dimming away

three summers in the earth.

large grin, to say thank you to her. And he could do

things. It was wonderful what he could accomplish

with those enormous hands of his. She could have put

her hand into his and walked right off the edge of the

world. Which, in a way, is what she did.

She had grown up in a substantial house on a good

upland farm. Her family was not wealthy, but it was

an old family, proud ofitse1f, always conscious of

its position and of its responsibility to be itself. She

had known from childhood that she would be sent to

college. Almost from childhood she had understood

that she was destined to be married to a solid

professional man, a doctor perhaps, or (and this her

mother particularly favored) perhaps a minister.

And so when she married Elton she did so without

telling her family. She already knew their judgment

of Elton: “He’s nothing.” She and Elton simply drove

A Praise

14

“Mary became a daughter to every woman in the community.”

“Mary became a daughter to every woman in the community.”down to Hargrave one late October night, awakened a

preacher, and got married, hoping that their marriage

would be accepted as an accomplished fact. They

were wrong. It was not acceptable, and it was never

going to be. She no longer belonged in that house,

her parents told her. She no longer belonged to that

family. To them it would be as if she had never lived.

It was a different world, a new world to her, that she

came into then—a world of poverty and community.

In the world that Mary Penn had given up, a place

of far larger and richer farms, work was sometimes

exchanged, but the families were conscious of

themselves in a way that set them apart from one

another. Here, in this new world, neighbors were always

working together. “Many hands make light work,”

Uncle Isham Quail loved to say, though his own old

hands were no longer able to work much.

13

This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and

took them in with a warmth that answered her

parents’ rejection. The men, without asking or being

asked, included Elton in whatever they were doing.

They told him when and where they needed him.

They came to him when he needed them. He was

an apt and able hand, and they were glad to have

his help. Mary, who had more to learn than Elton,

became a daughter to every woman in the community.

She came knowing little, barely enough to begin, and

they taught her much. Thelma, Daisy, and the two

Josies taught her their ways of cooking, cleaning, and

sewing; they taught her to can, pickle, and preserve;

they taught her to do the women’s jobs in the hog

killing. They took her on their expeditions to one

another’s houses to cook harvest meals or to gather

corn from the fields and can it.

Josie Tom was a plump, pretty, happy woman,

childless but the mother of any child in reach. Mary

Penn loved her the best, perhaps, but she loved them

all. They were only in their late thirties or early forties,

but to Mary they seemed to belong to the ageless,

eternal generation of mothers, unimaginably older

and more experienced than herself. She called them

16

Miss Josie, Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma.

They warmed and sheltered her.

When she got back into the house, she was shivering, her

teeth chattering. She unbuttoned her coat without

taking it off and sat down close to the stove. She had

much that she needed to be doing, she told herself.

She ought at least to get up and make the bed. And

she wanted to tend to the lamps; it always pleased her

to have them clean. But she did not get up. The stove’s

heat drove the cold out of her clothes, and gradually

her shivering stopped.

They had had a hard enough time of it their first

winter. They had no fuel, no food laid up. Elton had

raised a crop but no garden. He borrowed against

the crop to buy a meat hog. He cut and hauled in

firewood. He worked for wages to buy groceries, but

the times were hard and he could not always find

work. Sometimes their meals consisted of biscuits and

a gravy made of lard and flour.

And yet they were often happy. Often the world

afforded them something to laugh about. Elton stayed

alert for anything that was funny and brought the

stories home. He told her how the tickle-ass grass got

17

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,

to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

descending in the dark?

The Man Born to Farming

“And yet they were often happy.

“And yet they were often happy.

Often the worldafforded them something

to laugh about.”

19

into Uncle Isham’s pants, and how Daisy Hample

clucked to her nearsighted husband and children like

a hen with halfgrown chicks.

But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt

herself a part without a counterpart, a mere fragment

of something unknown, dark and broken off. 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 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.

She lay chattering and shivering while the bedclothes

warmed around her. It seemed to her that a time

might come when sickness would be a great blessing,

for she truly did not care if she died. She thought

of Elton, caught up in the day’s wind, who could

not even look at her and see that she was sick. If she

had not been too miserable, she would have cried.

But then her thoughts began to slip away, like dishes

sliding along a table pitched as steeply as a roof. She

went to sleep.

20

When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on

the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Josie

Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight

flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she

had draped over her lap. She was humming the tune

of an old hymn, something she often did while she

was working, apparently without awareness that she

was doing it. Her voice was resonant, low, and quiet,

barely audible, as if it were coming out of the air and

she, too, were merely listening to it. The yellow flower

was nearly complete.

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?”

“Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said. And she slept again.

21

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and ofvarious legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling

into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth. And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

Enriching the Earth

22

“…what was heaviest and

most mute is at last raised up into song.”

23

“…what was heaviest and

most mute is at last raised up into song.”

The Broken Ground

Clearing

Collected Poems: 1951-1982

The Country of Marriage

Entries

Farming: A Hand Book

Findings

Given

Openings

A Part

Sabbaths

Sayings and Doings

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (I998)

A Timbered Choir

The Wheel

Poems

24

Berry’s Complete Works

Fidelity

Hannah Coulter

Jayber Crow

The Memory of Old Jack

Nathan Coulter

A Place on Earth

Remembering

That Distant Land

Watch with Me

The Wild Birds

A World Lost

Another Turn of the Crank

The Art of the Commonplace

Citizenship Papers

A Continuous Harmony

The Gift of Good Land

Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work

The Hidden Wound

Home Economics

Life Is a Miracle

The Long-Legged House

Recollected Essays: 1965-1980

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

Standing by Words

The Unforeseen Wilderness

The Unsettling of America

What Are People For?

Fiction Essays

25

Berry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural.

(CH) New York: Harcourt, 1972.

“The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16-22.

(Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?)

The Long-Legged House. (LLH) New York: Harcourt, 1969.

Standing by Words. (SBW) San Francisco: North Point, 1983.

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San

Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986.

What Are People For? (WPF) San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry

Studies 2.1 (1971): 7-15.

Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9-14.

Bibliography

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This book was designed by Jessica Yeung in the Communication Design

studio at Washington University in St. Louis for Typograhy II.

The typeface used in this book is Baskerville.

When I falllet me fall without regret

like a leaf.