RIP Wendell Berry, whose poems, novels, essays, and environmental thinking challenged people to take better care of ourselves, our communities, and the land.
I read one of his books of agrarian essays in college, but what’s stuck with me ever since is his poetry. I first read this one as a sophomore in college, and it has that comfortable, relaxing feeling only poetry can make:
The Peace of the Wild Things
Wendell BerryWhen despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light, for a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
One of my favorite Berry essays is “Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer,” where he shares his 9 rules for new technology. It was written in 1987, but it’s just as relevant today as then. I remember it being a small reason I got into typewriters during the pandemic (the main reason is that they make me really happy, like a big bookshelf of books does).
Wendell didn’t like to write at a computer; he used a pencil or pen and paper, or his wife typed his work on their Royal standard typewriter — which they “bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then.” My mother-in-law has a great Royal standard (with gravestone keys), but my main typer is my 1964 Smith Corona Galaxie II, which I used to type up a few Berry poems.
Another Berry poem I like is “A Meeting”:
A Meeting
Wendell BerryIn a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same.
For the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: ‘How you been?’
He grins and looks at me.
’I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.’