Poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry died yesterday at 92. With his death, America loses one of its deepest, most deliberate thinkers, a rural American who spoke for rural America more clearly, honestly, thoughtfully, devotedly, Christianly, and consistently than any other figure in contemporary American life.
Somehow I didn’t get around to reading Wendell Berry’s foundational 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, until just last month. Berry’s ideas came to me by osmosis from a great philosophy professor at South Dakota State University and a group of smart students with whom I was strangely connected but with whom I didn’t have the good gosh-darn sense to take the class in which they and that professor spent an entire semester reading and discussing The Unsettling of America and Berry’s philosophy. One of those students told me that course and that book changed the course of her philosophical life. That student also happened to marry me. She invited that professor to read from the Bible at our wedding, and he read deliciously. She has since often read chapters and essays and poems from Berry to me, and I have often referred to Berry’s deep agrarian thinking in my own inferior polemics against superficial ruralists.
Bill Moyers recorded a remarkable conversation with Wendell Berry in 2013. Here is one of the rare occasions on which “The Mad Farmer” sat with any journalist for a video interview. In responses to Moyers’s questions and in readings of his work, Berry explains the core ideas that motivated his work from the beginning of his career in the 1960s. Wendell Berry does not distill to any single catchphrase; he wrote and spoke too thoughtfully, deeply, and integrally for that. I quote him briefly below; I encourage you to read this great American philosopher in full.
Moyers: Resettling of America means…?
Berry: It means putting people on the land, enough people on the land to take proper care of it and pay them decently for doing it. The fact that we in our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn’t make a living there is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn’t make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living is preposterous. And it’s a result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place.
To make a living is not to make a killing; it’s to have enough.
…Well, you got to be contrary, but there’s a world of pleasure in contrariness.
—Wendell Berry, in conversation with Bill Moyers, 2013.10.04.
Related thoughts:
- Another person whose life was changed in the 1990s by reading Wendell Berry: entertainer and woodworker Nick Offerman:
- This spring, Offerman reads Berry’s poem of fierce and loving contrariness “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front“: