Wendell Berry and the Land

This post first appeared as an article for The Christian Manifesto.

Novelist, essayist and poet Wendell Berry is a kind of living icon for Christian writers and environmentalists, especially “crunchy cons,” those conservative Christian believers who eagerly and rather joyfully embrace an environmentalist ethic (and I would have to count myself among that number, at least to some degree). There are good reasons for his iconic status.

First, Berry is a fine writer and a fine poet. His work embraces a considerable body of novels, short stories, poetry and essays.

Second, Berry is a writer who happens to be a Christian, and his faith is not an obstacle for readers and critics who don’t share it.

Third, his writing is all of a piece, a coherent worldview and way of understanding the world. It is a worldview with deep roots in the American agrarian tradition, a reverence for the land and a reverence for the human connection to the land. And that reverence leads to what Berry sees as the contemporary “disconnect” between the vast majority of people and the land, the source of physical and even spiritual sustenance. From Berry’s book of poems A Timbered Choir (1998):

I have again come home
through miles of sky
from hours of abstract talk
in the way of modern time.
When humans live in their minds
and the world, forgotten, dies
into explanations. Weary
with absence, I return to earth.

A Timbered Choir contains some of Berry’s most articulated environmental views, as least as he expresses them in poetry form. These views are more pronounced, sharper, even darker in Leavings: Poems (2010):

If we have become a people incapable
Of thought, then the brute-thought
Of mere power and mere greed
Will think for us…

Those who use the world assuming
their knowledge is sufficient
destroy the world…

Industrial humanity,
an alien species, lives by death.

What’s interesting is that Berry does not articulate some concept of a return to nature, or “back to the woods;” instead, it is an agrarian view of small farms and abandoned small farms, with trees growing where fields were once tilled and planted, once-sturdy barns weathered and collapsing, symbols of a people disconnected from their ancestral roots.

Berry develops these same themes and ideas in his novels and short stories, and one compact place to see them all is in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (2004), which not only includes 23 short stories but stories arranged in chronological order – not in the order they were written but in the order of the time in which they fictionally occurred. (Berry’s seven novels are included in the list to show as well where they fall in the overall story narrative.)

He tells wonderful stories, stories that are geographically compact. They are all set in the fictional Port William region, in Kentucky along the Ohio River across from Indiana. The stories explore both people and the land, and how they interrelate, and Berry writes with both humor and serious purpose. We meet people like Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie when they are courting and when they are an old married couple; Elton Penn as both a 12-year-old driving a Model A and a young farmer striving to create a batter life for both his well-born wife and himself; Wheeler Catlett, who “inherits” the care of his alcoholic Uncle Peach and later helps Elton Penn gain ownership of a farm; and Uncle Peach himself, who we meet in a drunken stupor in a Louisville hotel and eventually bid farewell to at his funeral. (Wheeler as a boy and Uncle Peach made new appearances in a short story by Berry published in the Oxford American Magazine in 2011.)

And the land – the land is always a character in Berry’s stories and poems, perhaps the main character. He writes about the land in religious and Christian terms, using words like faith, resurrection, heaven and Sabbath. “The land must have its Sabbath/or take it when we starve,” he writes in A Timbered Choir.

And, Berry writes in his stories and poems, we moderns, we “industrial aliens,” live cut off from the land, from our agrarian past. Because of that, we have lost something, not just our history, but also something of our very souls.

Wendell Berry and the Land

Novelist, essayist and poet Wendell Berry is a kind of living icon for Christian writers and environmentalists, especially “crunchy cons,” those conservative Christian believers who eagerly and rather joyfully embrace an environmentalist ethic (and I would have to count myself among that number, at least to some degree). There are good reasons for his iconic status.

First, Berry is a fine writer and a fine poet. His work embraces a considerable body of novels, short stories, poetry and essays.

Second, Berry is a writer who happens to be a Christian, and his faith is not an obstacle for readers and critics who don’t share it.

Third, his writing is all of a piece, a coherent worldview and way of understanding the world. It is a worldview with deep roots in the American agrarian tradition, a reverence for the land and a reverence for the human connection to the land. And that reverence leads to what Berry sees as the contemporary “disconnect” between the vast majority of people and the land, the source of physical and even spiritual sustenance. From Berry’s book of poems A Timbered Choir (1998):

I have again come home

through miles of sky

from hours of abstract talk

in the way of modern time.

When humans live in their minds

and the world, forgotten, dies

into explanations. Weary

with absence, I return to earth.

A Timbered Choir contains some of Berry’s most articulated environmental views, as least as he expresses them in poetry form. These views are more pronounced, sharper, even darker in Leavings: Poems (2010):

If we have become a people incapable

Of thought, then the brute-thought

Of mere power and mere greed

Will think for us…

Those who use the world assuming

their knowledge is sufficient

destroy the world…

Industrial humanity,

an alien species, lives by death.

What’s interesting is that Berry does not articulate some concept of a return to nature, or “back to the woods;” instead, it is an agrarian view of small farms and abandoned small farms, with trees growing where fields were once tilled and planted, once-sturdy barns weathered and collapsing, symbols of a people disconnected from their ancestral roots.

Berry develops these same themes and ideas in his novels and short stories, and one compact place to see them all is in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (2004), which not only includes 23 short stories but stories arranged in chronological order – not in the order they were written but in the order of the time in which they fictionally occurred. (Berry’s seven novels are included in the list to show as well where they fall in the overall story narrative.)

He tells wonderful stories, stories that are geographically compact. They are all set in the fictional Port William region, in Kentucky along the Ohio River across from Indiana. The stories explore both people and the land, and how they interrelate, and Berry writes with both humor and serious purpose. We meet people like Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie when they are courting and when they are an old married couple; Elton Penn as both a 12-year-old driving a Model A and a young farmer striving to create a batter life for both his well-born wife and himself; Wheeler Catlett, who “inherits” the care of his alcoholic Uncle Peach and later helps Elton Penn gain ownership of a farm; and Uncle Peach himself, who we meet in a drunken stupor in a Louisville hotel and eventually bid farewell to at his funeral. (Wheeler as a boy and Uncle Peach made new appearances in a short story by Berry published in the Oxford American Magazine last fall.)

And the land – the land is always a character in Berry’s stories and poems, perhaps the main character. He writes about the land in religious and Christian terms, using words like faith, resurrection, heaven and Sabbath. “The land must have its Sabbath/or take it when we starve,” he writes in A Timbered Choir.

And, Berry writes in his stories and poems, we moderns, we “industrial aliens,” live cut off from the land, from our agrarian past. Because of that, we have lost something, not just our history, but also something of our very souls.

This article was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but the site was redesigned and the archive (with all of my posts) disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting some of the articles I wrote for the publication.

If You Can't get Enough Wendell Berry

Christian Manifesto has posted my article "Wendell Berry and the Land," which takes a look at how Berry's philosophy of the land -- a kind of spiritual reverence -- plays through his short stories (That Distant Land) and poetry.

Related posts:

My review of That Distant Land published here last week.

My review of Berry's Leavings: Poems posted at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry's "That Distant Land"

That Distant Land: Collected Stories includes all of Wendell Berry’s short stories published up to 2004. It’s a remarkable body of work, and it’s only the short stories – it doesn’t include the novels, the books of poetry or the essays and articles.

Maybe I should say what a remarkable writer Wendell Berry is. If you haven’t read Berry before, you should. Choose anything by him. Anything. In his novels and short stories, you walk into the fictional world of Port William, Kentucky. It is a small world, geographically speaking, a few square miles on the banks of the Ohio River across from Indiana. But it stands for something much larger, something more universal, and something that's important.

Two of the stories serve as a kind of bookend summary of the whole volume, and tell you much about the author’s beliefs and philosophy, and the ideas that infuse all of his writing.

“It Wasn’t Me” uses the form of an auction to pit a reverence for the land against the narrow and uncaring commercial use of it. There are three bidders: a young man named Elton Penn who has farmed the land for his landlord; a doctor, who is most likely looking for an investment and possible tax shelter but who would be more than willing to have Penn manage it; and a neighboring farmer who wants to expand his farm holdings, and this particular farm sits right in the middle of it. In the few short pages of the story, Berry explores motives and beliefs, stripping them down to bare essentials. This is a clichéd story of “good versus evil;” it is something deeper and more profound than that.

In the other story, “The Boundary,” 82-year-old Mat Feltner’s world has, because of his advancing age, become increasingly confined to the area immediately around his farmhouse. But he begins to worry that a fence hasn’t been properly maintained, and he sets out on foot to check it, much to his wife’s concern. The fence turns out to be fine, but Mat’s journey turns into both an exploration of memory and the land, as well as a physical ordeal.


Both stories encapsulate the themes of all of Berry’s writings, fiction and non-fiction alike:
· A spiritual reverence for the land. This isn’t “nature for nature’s sake” but a reverence that recognizes the innate connection we have to the land.
· A belief, some might say a recognition, that for most of us, the connection to the land is forgotten and broken. We think of it, when we think of it at all, as a financial asset, something that’s part of our investment portfolio or that shelters taxes.
· We are stewards of the land, and because of that, we are also stewards of memory, because some of our most profound memories are found in land and place.

All of these stories display a beauty of thought and narrative. And they arranged in the table of contents in the order they occur in Berry’s fictional world. (The novels are also listed in this chronology to show where they are placed in the rich world he’s created.) Arranging them this way, and adding a genealogy and a map at the end of the volume, emphasizes that memory, history and people are inevitably one with the land, part of a coherent whole that Berry believes we have fractured and nearly destroyed in contemporary life.

He may have a point.