I read Wendell Berry while in prison, and he impressed me. Another American writer who needs more attention.
Wendell Berry, Son of Kentucky (Jake Meador, The Dispatch):
But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed, all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life of a community. His many essays and lectures were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words, the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well known to committed democrats like Emerson.
But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of knowledge.”
That writer, of course, is the late Mr. Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of Mr. Berry’s life.
Among the several things that helped turn my life around and gave me the means of putting together the shards of myself, it was Thoreau. The above essay ties Berry with Thoreau and that now makes sense to me and gives depth to Wendell Berry’s Nine Rules by Ted Gioia.
Gioia's essay provoked this response from my friend KH:
It is an age of specialization. I used to be able to work on my car, now I can’t. OTOH, they’re much safer, fewer people are killed in them and they’re spaceships compared with 25 years ago.We used to think pagers were amazing. Now we have a computer in our hands.I’m concerned with Big Tech but that’s a failure of government to regulate. Standard Oil and the railroads were once big tech. Then came TR.If you want to move to a farm in Kentucky and live off the land, you can probably eschew all of this. The rest of us have to live in 2026.
Nick Offerman on the Essential Wisdom of Wendell Berry (Literary Hub)
sch 9/3
