The Presence of Still Water: Remembering Wendell Berry

Young writers dream of landing a plum teaching position in New York, after which they can spend the rest of their years quoting Nora Ephron at cocktail parties, decorating their Nancy Meyers kitchens, complaining about Michiko Kakutani, and basically living the life of a character in a New Yorker cartoon.

That’s essentially how things started out for Wendell Berry, who grew up in Kentucky but then quickly racked up some graduate degrees, fellowships, and a respectable academic appointment at NYU. But then, with alacrity that would startle even the main character in a Hallmark movie, Berry left the big city and returned to a two-room cabin in rural Kentucky. In short order he was raising sheep and growing corn. The cartoonists at the New Yorker don’t even know how to draw this stuff.

Counterintuitively, this is how he became one of America’s most beloved and wide-ranging writers. He wrote poems that explored experiencing the natural world as a necessary spiritual practice. He wrote essays that were as personal as they were exhortatory, building forceful arguments against industrial farming, global economics, and ecological degradation. And he wrote fiction – mostly novels, all set in the same fictional Kentucky farm town, quietly lyrical and, occasionally, earnestly heavy-handed. And he wrote it all longhand and only in natural light – because writing in the evening by electric light would mean being implicated in destructive mining practices.

Berry, who died August 31 at the age of 92, was in many ways a contemporary inheritor of Thoreau’s tradition: both advocated simplicity as a lifestyle; both celebrated the natural world; both removed themselves from the malign influence of hectic modernity. A few differences: as far as I can tell, Berry doesn’t seem ever to have gone to jail, despite his political activism. And by all accounts he wasn’t as big a jerk as Thoreau. Worst case scenario, you might get trapped at a dinner table with him while he goes on a little too long about topsoil.

The essays made him famous but if you’re looking to read Wendell Berry for the first time, try his poetry – resonant, eloquent, accessible, pastoral, imagistic, rooted in the physical world. It’s the kind of reflective, grounded verse that your poetry-loving friends love to share – ironically on Facebook, where it seems likely Berry didn’t have an account.