I
am holding a copy of "The Unsettling of America: Culture &
Agriculture" by Wendell Berry, which I acquired almost four decades
ago, in 1987 (published in 1977). It was the first book that awakened me, and I am sure many
Americans, to the looming disaster of losing contact with nature and to the way
technology would infiltrate every aspect of our lives, potentially robbing us of our humanity and leaving us gasping for
meaning and purpose. “I’ve
been farming for over 40 years, and I’ve come to realize the importance in
keeping traditional values & strong community ties,” wrote Berry. “We should
not be so quick to trust technology but rather hold on to our agrarian values.”
Wendell
Berry's passing on 31 August 2026 at age 92 marks the end of an American
original. A novelist, poet, essayist, conservationist, and farmer, he was less well
known to the public than two other icons who also recently left us, Dolly
Parton and Gloria Steinem. Yet his unwavering loyalty to his conscience and community,
as reflected in the full life he led as a husband to his beloved wife Tanya, a writer, and a farmer, will
inspire generations who read him and reflect on his work.
Berry
exhorted us to value the natural and the genuine over the artificial and the
contrived. (In this, in my opinion, he belongs to a group that includes Henry David Thoreau,
E. B. White, Loren Eiseley, and yes, Jimmy Carter). He distinguished the nurturer from the
exploiter: “The exploiter serves an institution or organization,” he wrote in The
Unsettling of America, “the nurturer serves land, household, community,
place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, ‘hard facts,’ the
nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality.” He regarded the ecological
crisis, now called climate change, as a crisis of character. He believed the
disease of modern character was specialization, which produced specialists
elaborately and expensively trained to do just one thing. Thus we have
“educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say,
and doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases they have no interest in
preventing.”
One
of his maxims that fans spread across social media is: “Rats and roaches
live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of
human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
Berry’s
books and essays may come across as uncompromising in their indictment of our
lifestyles, priorities, and politics, but he never flinched from writing what
he believed to be the truth. He practiced what he preached, giving up
prestigious writing and teaching positions at elite universities to make a
living as a farmer on his Lane’s Landing homestead in Henry County, Kentucky, and
to write.
And
write he did, over fifty books of poetry, essays, novels, and short story
collections. I devoured his fiction, many set in the fictional Port William,
Kentucky, such as The Memory of Old Jack, Nathan Coulter, Hannah
Coulter, Remembering, A Place on Earth, and, in my opinion,
the most moving and powerful of all, Jayber Crow, short story
collections like Fidelity, The Wild Birds, A Place in Time,
and essay collections such as The Gift of Good Land, The Long-Legged
House, The Art of the Common Place, What Are People For, A Continuous
Harmony, The Hidden Wound, Standing By Words, Home Economics, Citizenship
Papers, Our Only World, and of course, The Unsettling of America.
In
2008, a member of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for
Literature, caused a furor when he explained with righteous authority why
American writers had been coming up empty for several years in the Nobel Prize
race. “American literature is second-rate,” said the judge, arguing that
American writers were too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture, which
dragged down their quality. “They don’t participate in the big dialogue of
literature. That ignorance is restraining.”
I
remember thinking at the time: Has the judge, or any of his colleagues, ever
read Wendell Berry? If they had, they would have discovered a unique voice
that, through masterpieces like Jayber Crow, not only engaged in the
“big dialogue of literature” but also extended its boundaries.
(For
the record, American Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 and
Louise Glück in 2020.)
The
truth is, Wendell Berry transcended awards and honors. He wrote what he
believed, using language both lyrical and fierce, pointing to a sustainable yet
adventurous life. One way we can honor Wendell Berry’s legacy is to read his
writings, promote his books in book clubs sprouting across America, and engage
in lively discussions about what makes his writing about neighborliness, compassion, peace, generosity, fidelity, memory, and much, much more, timeless.
As
a Muslim, I was surprised and thrilled to read a foreword by Wendell Berry
to the book “My Mercy Encompasses All” by an Islamic scholar named
Reza-Shah Kazmi, published in 2007. Berry felt that Christians and Muslims may be divided into two
groups: “those who appoint themselves as agents of divine anger and those who
understand themselves as called to be agents of divine mercy … To think
of oneself as an agent of God’s anger is exceedingly attractive … There are
certain intense pleasures in anger, especially if one’s own anger can be
presumed to coincide with God’s, and also in the use of an angry
self-righteousness as a standard by which to condemn other people. This is
pleasure necessarily founded on the shallowest sort of self-knowledge … To take
up, by contrast, the agency of God’s mercy seems to involve one in a labor of
self-knowledge and then knowledge of others that is endlessly humbling … We
ourselves are in need of those things we are called upon to give to others: compassion,
forgiveness, mercy. And unless we give them, we cannot receive them … Those who
accept the agency of God’s mercy, understanding their own need for it as the
index of the need of others, must forbear their anger and talk together until
the end of time, for God’s mercy is a mystery never to be fully known or
enacted by humans.”
I
re-read his books every now and then because Wendell Berry fills me with the
hope that a better life is possible if we get off the treadmill of wanting more
and more, focus on community and compassion rather than on self and fame, and
pursue work that aligns with our values rather than where the money is.
