海角大神

Early in his professional career, while on the faculty at NYU and living at the epicenter of the literary world, Wendell Berry decided to leave his job and New York City and return home to Henry County, Kentucky, to the place and people that mattered most to him. Upon hearing of his decision, an elder faculty member summoned him to his office with the intention of persuading him to stay. First alluding to Thomas Wolfe鈥檚 famous quote 鈥測ou can鈥檛 go home again,鈥� the man went on to argue that 鈥渙nce one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one鈥檚 origins was canceled out; there simply could be nothing worth going back to鈥� (鈥淎 Native Hill,鈥� 1968).

HAH! Imagine some stick-in-the-mud telling Thoreau not to bother living alone out there at Walden Pond, or some stuffed-shirt hectoring Melville for signing aboard that foul-smelling merchant ship, or some worrywart cautioning Robert Frost about taking roads less traveled by? Fortunately for us, Berry did not heed that bad advice. Instead, he went back to his small-town roots because he 鈥渘ever doubted that the world was more important to [him] than the literary world鈥� (鈥淎 Native Hill,鈥� 1968). It is his profound understanding of self, place, and personal responsibility that has established Berry鈥檚 essential greatness as a writer, poet, philosopher, naturalist, and neighbor.

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry is a selection of 31 essays spanning five decades of his works, and it could not have come at a better time as our nation thrashes about in search of a voice of reason. Who better than Berry to explain to us 鈥渨ho we are, where we are, and what we must do to live鈥� (鈥淭he Way of Ignorance,鈥� 2004)? The essays are not presented in chronological order, nor even in any kind of thematic progression; rather, the collection, arranged by Paul Kingsnorth of County Galway, Ireland, rhapsodizes in a kind of orchestral composition of rhetorical movements 鈥� from ethos to pathos to logos and back again.

Berry is not confined to the subjects related to his bailiwick i.e., agrarian culture, and is utterly unafraid of any topic that sticks in his craw, as only a humble 鈥渁pprentice of creation鈥� and a writer without institutional affiliations can be. He lays into quite an assortment of subjects from economics to feminism to education to civil disobedience, and a whole host of topics in between, each one a treasure of insight and strategic action.

In the collection鈥檚 first essay 鈥淎 Native Hill鈥� (also the longest at 35 pages), Berry explains his decision to return to the land and his hometown as he walks his reader through his beloved world along the banks of the Kentucky River. Berry is at his best when in motion, poetically punctuating his romp through the landscape with delicious descriptions of the flowering bluebells and stately sycamores, all up and through 鈥渢he east-facing bluff where the bloodroot bloom in scattered colonies around the foot of the rotting monument of a tree trunk.鈥�

At one point he beholds a Great blue heron doing a backward loop-the-loop, as a sort of 鈥渂enediction on the evening and on the river and on me. It seemed so perfectly to confirm the presence of a free nonhuman joy in the world 鈥� a joy I feel great need to believe in.鈥�

But this pulsating joy of his, living next to nature, is always tempered by his robust disgust and awareness of the ominous 鈥減erhaps fatal鈥� effect of one鈥檚 鈥減resumptuousness in living in a place by the imposition on it of one鈥檚 ideas and wishes.鈥� This joyous discontent is his gift.

From end to spirited/defiant end, he calls out all the villains of our day e.g., specialists, corporations and the corporate life, the industrial economy, arrogant ignorance, false feminism, life-expectancy data, academics, rational minds, causes, salesmen, public relations experts, the concept of limitlessness, prejudice against country folks, the future, technological innovations, transience, to name a few. It鈥檚 a wonderful catharsis ... most of the time, but there鈥檚 not a reader out there who won鈥檛 get his or her nose tweaked. To give a personal example, Berry begins his essay 鈥淲riter and Region鈥� (1987) by both acknowledging the influence of Mark Twain鈥檚 Huckleberry Finn on his own life, and on the American psyche, positing that it 鈥渞emains crucial for us, both its virtues and its faults.鈥� He then goes on at great length (10 plus pages) about those Huckleberry faults of ours i.e., 鈥渢he yen to escape to the Territory, and retribution against the life that one has escaped or wishes to escape.鈥�

As a child of the suburbs myself, with its 鈥渃artoon scrawlscape,鈥�* and as a sometimes member of the literary world, with its impecunious loyalties, Ich bin ein Huckleberry Finn ! That said, even Rachel Carson wouldn鈥檛 disagree with his ultimate point that 鈥渃ommon experience and common effort on a common ground ... such [as]a community has been very little regarded in American literature.鈥�

While there have been other efforts recently to try to explain who we are and why, such as Kurt Andersen鈥檚 "Fantasyland" (2017 ) in which he suggests that America was discovered by and continually led by dreamers and make-believe crackpots with a far-flung fantasy complex that is hard-wired in their DNA; or James C. Scott鈥檚 "Against the Grain" (2017), which dismisses the standard model of agrarian domesticity not as the climax community of our species but as just another way for the masters of the universe to take control of reproduction; it is Berry alone who explains not only who we are and why, but also what we need to do to help ourselves.

In the collection鈥檚 most recently published essay, 鈥淭he Future of Agriculture,鈥� 2011, he lays out a seven-point action plan, all of which he avers 鈥渃annot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation.鈥� But it is perhaps in 鈥淭he Way of Ignorance,鈥� originally a paper written for a conference at the Land Institute in 2004 that Berry cuts straight to the heart of the matter, stating that 鈥淚gnorance plus arrogance plus greed ... produces the ozone hole and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.鈥� From there he tears into the corporate and scientific and industrial arrogance that have caused many of the great problems of the world. Berry鈥檚 answer to our large problems is not large solutions, but 鈥渕any small solutions鈥� at the local and individual levels with the simple acceptance of 鈥渢he wisdom of humility.鈥�

"The World-Ending Fire" ought to be required reading in every classroom across this land, for if America today is Pottersville, which it is, and if we are all, collectively, George Bailey, then Wendell Berry is our National Guardian Angel!

*from James Kunstler鈥檚 "Home from Nowhere," 1996

Richard Horan is an award-winning author of two novels: 鈥淟ife in the Rainbow鈥� and 鈥淕oose Music,鈥� and two non-fiction books: 鈥淪eeds鈥� and Harvest.鈥� His latest work, 鈥淣otes from the Nuthouse,鈥� a play in three acts, is in the running for the Relentless Award.