Two recent events started me thinking about Wendell Berry’s work once again.
First, a month ago my wife and I stopped in Port Royal, Berry’s hometown, on our way from Chattanooga, TN to Grand Rapids, MI. Port Royal is not on the way, especially not if you drive the most direct, efficient way: taking interstate highways. But in the last several years, we have used our GPS to avoid highways and toll roads. We are well into our 70s, both retired, both slowing down. We no longer have strict schedules to meet. And I no longer enjoy driving fast, and I find interstate driving not quite terrifying, but at least very unsettling. So most of the time now we chart a course that uses two-lane roads, taking us away from congested areas. Last month, after we had been on the road for a couple hours and were getting near the Kentucky border, I checked a map and noticed that our GPS was going to take us within 15 miles of Port Royal. So we ended up stopping there.
Over the last 30 years, I have read most of Berry’s published works; some of his non-fiction, like A Continuous Harmony and Home Economics, many times. So I had a clear picture of Berry’s hometown in my mind. The real Port Royal was not anything like what I had imagined. It was tiny, looked like less than 100 people lived there, and almost every building in town was rundown. Only a feed and seed store seemed in good repair. We went inside, chatted for perhaps 10 minutes with the fellow manning the cash register (who looked like a character from one of Berry’s novels). He told us Wendell was 90 years old, starting to show his age. After we had chatted, he even gave us directions to Berry’s farm, which surprised us. We talked about driving there, but decided against it. One reason was that we did not want to disturb Wendell or his wife, if what I had read about him were true. I was pretty sure he would want to be left alone. But, more importantly, I feared that Berry’s farm might be as disappointing as the town of Port Royal was.
Second, last week I stumbled upon an essay about Berry’s latest novel, written by an acquaintance of mine, a person whose work I respect a great deal. Her essay got me thinking about how seriously I should take Berry’s vision: his celebration of subsistence farms and the communities in which they are situated and his severe critiques of most aspects of our urban and suburban industrialized society. I will admit that I haven’t read much of Berry within the last 5 years. And if someone were to examine my life, they would see almost no evidence of Berry’s influence.
My wife and I live in Chattanooga, TN, a city of slightly under 200,000 people. Though my wife continues to garden, even has a primitive composting system, almost her entire garden is ornamental. She has a few tomato plants; no other vegetables. We depend upon big grocery chains for our food; we own two cars; our house is heated—and cooled—by two heatpumps; our neighbors’ houses are less than 20 feet from ours. Quite far from an agrarian ideal. As I finished Nadya’s essay on Berry, my first thought was that Berry had zero influence on my thinking and living, even though I still dropped his name occasionally in conversation. I went to bed a bit sad, as I reflected upon how I had lost my vision of the good life as Berry understood it, had given up and given in to modernity.
But my unconscious mind must have been at work while I slept, for when I got out of bed the next morning, I remembered a very rough exploratory essay I had written on Berry many years ago. I found it, reread it, and was somewhat encouraged that—even though I live a typical urban lifestyle— there are four ways that Berry’s writing has a positive impact on me.
First, even though I have adopted a contemporary, urban lifestyle (notice the irony of my wife and I using GPS to find Port Royal), I find that Berry’s writing keeps me from doing that mindlessly, unconsciously. His writing acts as an intellectual brake for me: helps me notice alternatives to my normal way of operating in the world. I compare his influence on me to the influence of the Amish, the Hutterites, monks and nuns. We lived in southeastern Pennsylvania for many years and had numerous encounters with Amish families. Whenever I passed an Amish buggy on my drive through the Lancaster region, I was reminded that one did not have to own a car and drive 70 mph to get where one wanted to go. During harvest season, I was reminded that one could bring in crops without using heavy, expensive, polluting machinery—just the sort of thing that Berry often describes in his fiction and nonfiction. I had similar reactions when I read about the Hutterites farming on the American Prairie. While so many farmers and ranchers were failing, the Hutterites not only endured, but were thriving because of their communal lifestyle and very selective use of gas-powered farm equipment.
I have not purchased horses and a buggy. I still own two cars. But Berry has helped me think very carefully about the type of car I own, how often I drive, how to combine trips so that I do not mindlessly waste gas and clog up the roads. In fact, we moved back into the St. Elmo community of Chattanooga because it is a bounded community; we can walk to church, grocery stores, the post office, and friends' houses. Not that I don’t drive more often than I probably should. But I am quite aware when I make the choice to drive to buy groceries that I had another choice. Berry is a significant part of that awareness.
Second, Berry has changed the way I think about sin. I was raised on The Westminster Shorter Catechism, so I learned to think of sin as “any want of conformity to, or transgression of, the law of God.” Another way to put that was that sin was “missing the mark.” But Berry talks more about sin as “separation.” As I understand him, he does not simply mean that some of our sins can or might separate us from others (the way adultery separates one spouse from another). But he suggests we sin because we think of ourselves as separate from—different from, maybe better than—other people. That might be a big thing. For example, I might commit adultery because I think my needs are more important than my wife’s. I will admit that is an obvious example, one that most of us recognize as “sin.” But I also see this working on a much smaller scale. Take, for example, our willingness to run red lights or stop signs, or pass other vehicles on the shoulder of the road. Berry has helped me see that I do that because I think I am different than, more important than the others drivers on the road with me. My need to get to my destination 10 seconds faster than other people at an intersection allows me to endanger others by speeding through a red light, rather than waiting my turn. That sounds like “sin” to me, the way Berry has defined it.
Third, Berry made me think about living with the consequences of what we do in a way I had not before. Let me give an example from industry. Decades ago, the Dupont Company required the managers of their chemical plants to live on the site where they worked. If there were problems with the byproducts Dupont produced at one of its plants, the manger and his family were as exposed to the effects just as any of the day laborers, as any of the neighbors of the plant were. On a trip through the desert west, I was reminded that we do not act like this much anymore. In talking to residents of these lightly-populated regions, we discovered that the industrialized east sends its most toxic waste to be buried in these remote areas, inhabited by a rather small number of people. These westerners do not produce this waste (or at least most of it), but they must live with the waste and what it does to their land, their animals and themselves.
Berry often uses examples from agriculture when he talks about this issue. But it seems to me that the principle can apply to residents of a high-rise apartment building in a major city just as it does to rural folks. I assume that many of the rules imposed on condominium owners by the boards that regulate behavior in these structures are the result of residents finding ways to help these neighbors live together in peace—even if they know almost no other residents of the condominium project. The rules eliminate behavior that could have unhappy consequences for all who dwell there.
Fourth, Berry reminds me that we can consider ourselves members of a community if we attempt to solve the problems of that community—rather than expecting someone else (perhaps a government agency) to solve the problem for us. One obvious example of that is a neighborhood creating a Neighborhood Watch program to prevent crime. Rather than expecting the police department to monitor their neighborhood regularly, residents can sacrifice a few hours of their free time each month to patrol their streets. Our little community of St Elmo has a serious problem with speeding drivers. The posted speed limit is 25MPH. But too often people passing through on their way from north Georgia to downtown Chattanooga drive twice as fast as that. I, along with many of my neighbors, complain loudly about that; we have urged our representative to City Council to do something. But nothing the government has tried has had any effect on the issue, as far as I can see. As an alternative, someone suggested that St. Elmo residents could organize community volunteers to drive through the neighborhood at the posted speed for an hour or so each week, so that all the streets would be covered by law-abiding citizens all day, keeping people from speeding through our community. Their presence would force speeding drivers to observe the law. This was a slightly different sort of “neighborhood watch” program, a small step toward solving the problems where we live and, thus, proving our community membership.
As I reread what I have written, I doubt Berry would be impressed with what I have said. Maybe he would feel that all he has written has been for naught—if his influence is to be judged by my response to his work. He might see my suggestions as “half-measures,” at best. But, admitting that possibility, I must conclude that Wendell Berry’s writing has opened my eyes. His works have made me aware of many of the problems of modernity and my own contribution to those problems. And isn’t awareness of a problem one step—even if a very small step—toward improving the world in which we live? Perhaps it is a sort of intellectual “widow’s mite” or “cup of cold water”?