Wendell Berry, Where Have You Been All My Life?
Last week I wrote about an essay by Wendell Berry that I happened upon in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s. Since then, I’ve been searching for more by Mr. Berry and, I have to say, I’m bowled over at the moment.
I’ve been grabbing and reading everything that I can get my hands on that’s been written by Mr. Berry or remotely related to him by way of mention.
Funny enough, one of the first things I pulled up was an article by Michael Pollan (of The Omnivore’s Dilemma fame) published in the New York Time’s 2008 Green issue. Taken together, Pollan’s NYT piece “Why Bother?” and Berry’s “Faustian Economics” make for some interesting back-to-back reading.
As for another response to “Faustian Economics” (one of the few online!? WTF!!?), we have Gary Norris of Dagzine weighing in with his thoughts.
Whatsmore, I found a letter that Berry sent to a group of former writing students at Millersburg Military Institute at the request of their former teacher, Alice C. Linsley. I’ll quote it here in full, as it served to remind me of my responsibilities to my audience as a writer:
Dear Friends,
Your teacher, Ms. Linsley, has written to tell me about your writing class, and to ask if I might have something encouraging to say to you. This is an assignment that I take seriously, and I have been asking myself what you should hear, at this time in your lives, from an older writer.
The thought that I keep returning to is this: By taking up the study of writing now, you are assuming consciously, probably for the first time in your lives, a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. We live in a time when we are surrounded by language that is glib, thoughtless, pointless, or deliberately false. If you learn to pay critical attention to what you hear on radio or television or read in the newspapers, you will see what I mean.
The first obligation of a writer is to tell the truth–or to come as near to telling it as is humanly possible. To do that, it is necessary to learn to write well. And to learn to write well, it is necessary to learn to read well. Reading will make you a better writer, provided you will read ever more attentively and critically. You will probably read a lot of contemporary writing in your textbooks, in magazines and newspapers, in popular novels, etc. The contemporary is inescapable. You may more easily escape the writing that is most necessary to you. I mean the books we know as “classics,” books that have been read for generations or for centuries and so have proved their excellence.
As you learn to judge what you read, you will learn also to judge, and so improve, what you write. Reading, I think, is half of your responsibility as students of writing. The other half of your responsibility, of course, is to write, and your effort to write well, as I hope you already know, will make you better readers.
But you must never forget that the purpose of all this effort is to become capable of knowing and telling the truth.
Yours sincerely,
Wendell Berry
Blam! I think we could all use a little more truth in our lives and language, not to mention sincerity. Also, I think our journalists and writers could use a little more reading of the classics. Now that I’m out of school, I kind of miss being given those reading assignments every now and then…
Lastly, the good people over at the Orion Society saw fit to print two of Berry’s pieces, nearly seven years ago. The first, Berry’s “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear”, serves as a manifest response to the events of 9/11. The second, entitled “The Idea of a Local Economy”, trumpets the intertwined principles of neighborhood and subsistence in envisioning a “new” economy. Both are brilliant and have aged well in increasing prescience.
Please do me the favor of reading through Mr. Berry’s work and asking more of your thought leaders, elected officials and journalists than what’s readily apparent or convenient these days.
I’m ready to elevate my discourse on science and technology to more appropriate levels and I’d like for all of you to come along and help me do a better job of it. I’m looking forward to telling you the truth, or at least coming as near to telling it as humanely possible ;^)
Curtiss P. Martin grew up in a geodesic dome on the side of a mountain in Southern Appalachia. Now he serves as ScribeMedia's clean technology editor in a tall building in downtown Manhattan.
As for my response on DagZine, I am working on completing in a post tonight (or tomorrow, if I am up in the wee hours.)
I am equally absorbed the essay. Berry pulls together quite a bit, for what amounts to a simple address. The implications of his points are worth considering: for me, because it sends me back to the foundations of my education and the principles that doctrine has instilled in me as a guy living in the market. It sends me back to what I have been encourage to leave IMPLIED. Better, ASSUMED.
The formation of our relatively cosmopolitan society and the resulting cultures is generally left unexamine, unspoken even. The Market, for example, is just there. There for use. And as it expands so should our use.
I am trying to examine, in a basic way, how we learned to assume ideas such as Limitlessness in what I think Berry is referring to, the liberal social order of the capitalist market economy.
Anyway, let’s keep working on this.
Thanks for posting his letter.
more to come…
This really struck me. The excess of excess really is the norm. Self-sufficiency can only be attained when people start realizing their true needs for sustainment are not likely to be met by attaining the new iPhone, or Hummer. Hurray, Wendall Berry! I and my rubber-banded-together-but-otherwise-still-highly-effective-cell-phone salute you! Thanks for the heads up, Curtiss, as always.
VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.