Happy Friday,
Cue the music, brew that pot. This week’s roundup is different. Wendell Berry died on Monday after dedicating his life to thinking, writing, and advocating for a society that takes care of each other and the land.
Here are 10 things about Berry I’m sharing this week:
- Berry was a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays, as well as a champion of agrarian communities and taking care of the land. He lived his values and challenged us to do the same. Here’s his obituary in the New York Times and The Guardian.
- I haven’t read nearly enough of Berry’s writing, but here’s what I’ve loved: his poem “The Peace of the Wild Things” is one of my favorites. “The Art of the Commonplace” is a great collection of agrarian essays. And “Why I Am not Going to Buy A Computer ” is one of my favorite essays as somebody who loves typewriters, the romanticism of journals, and — yes — spends most of their working hours at a computer.
- I enjoyed typing out two of my favorite Wendell Berry poems this week.
- I first read Wendell Berry in an environmental philosophy college course shortly after I’d declared my Environmental Studies major. Amazingly, all my course materials are still saved in my Google Drive! It was a delight this week to read what I was thinking 13 years ago when I first discovered Wendell. One of my favorite parts of the course was Wendell’s writing in “The Art of the Commonplace” that we don’t have the right to ask if we’ll be successful in mitigating environmental harms — we have the responsibility to address them whether we are successful or not.
- “’What’s curious to me is that, once started, you’re interested, you’re into it, you’re doing your work, and you’re happy,’ he said. ‘That applies to writing. Sometimes I don’t believe I can stand it another day, but then I’m working at problems I know how to deal with, to an extent.’” I read this excellent profile on Berry in the New Yorker in 2022, and it’s in my top ten profiles they’ve made. (The scene opens with his writing space.)
- This 2019 New Yorker interview with him is also excellent: “My father insisted on the use of the right words, on calling things by their right names, and his syntax was powerful. I have a big debt to his language.”
- If you’re not into agrarianism, or the importance of communities, or environmentalism in general — don’t worry! Ted Gioia, one of the bigger writers on Substack, wrote a while back about how Wendell’s rules for technology from decades ago are (not surprisingly) incredibly prescient in our current AI-driven, social-media-raddled society.
- Berry was the subject of a great Bill Moyers episode in 2013, which I watched with my dad the same semester I was reading him in college. “To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough.” Also features a much-younger Bill McKibben!
- Berry was very generous as a host but wasn’t a frequent media guest. Lucky for us, Nick Offerman — a student and advocate of Berry’s — shared some great stories about Berry in this Mountain & Prairie podcast.
- “Make a place to sit down./Sit down. Be quiet./…/Accept what comes from silence./Make the best you can of it.” Wendell’s advice for being a poet is good advice for being a better human being.
