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When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird.
by Wendell Berry
Wendell BerrySelected Works by
Berry’s work is an ongoing exploration of man’s use of and relationship
to the land and his writing constitues, as Gary Tolliver has said, one man’s
“continuing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of harmony
with the natural world”. To proponents of modern “progress,” Berry’s ideas
must seem regressive, unrealistic, radical. But no advice could be more
needed and more practical, if we are to progress.
Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching, his home and family,
and all that each involves are extraordinarily integrated. He understands
his writing as an attempt to elucideate certain connections, primarily the
interrelaionships and interdependencies of man and that natural world.
Berry’s Life
1
thinking of… the spring heavy
with official meaningless deaths.”
“In the night I lay awake,
As spring begins the river rises,
filling like the sorrow of nations
-uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains,
the debris of kitchens, all passing
seaward. At dawn snow began to fall.
The ducks, moving north, pass
like shadows through the falling white.
The jonquils, halfopen, bend down with its weight.
The plow freezes in the furrow.
In the night I lay awake, thinking
of the river rising, the spring heavy
with official meaningless deaths.
March 22, 1968
3
thinking of… the spring heavy
with official meaningless deaths.”
“In the night I lay awake,
We are destroying our country - I mean our country itself, our land. This is
a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to
continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will
not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary.
It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of
course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed?
Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all-by
proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians-
be participating in its destruction?
Since the beginning of the conservation effort, conservationists have
too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the
people. This has begun to change, but we will have to reckon with the old
assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness
areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes and the people
who use them. They are going to have to address issues of economy, which
is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities
where we do our work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.
Old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and
who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good
because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted
the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary,
were built by people who take no pride in the place, see no value in lives
an excerpt fromCompromise, Hell!
4
“But we have powerful polticial opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy
is justified by freedom and profit.”
lived there. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be
siphoned out of it to more fortunate places-that is, to the wealthier suburbs
of the larger cities.
There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction.
Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by
false advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to
destroy local, regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital
supplies such as food and textiles. It is impossible to understand, let alone
justify, a government’s willingness to allow the human sources of necessary
goods to be destroyed by the “freedom” of this corporate anarchy. It is
equally impossible to understand how a government can permit, and even
subsidize, the destruction of the land or of the land’s productivity.
It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that
should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large
number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is
wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who
insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit.
And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts
of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time-like the
famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be eaten all at once.
So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end
with hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning:
Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use
5
“But we have powerful polticial opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy
is justified by freedom and profit.”
that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy.
Humans don’t have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People
can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party,
can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of
our land’s exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems, and I will
offer a short list of practical suggestions.
We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by
“bringing in industry.” Every state government appears to be scheming
to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by “tax incentives”
and other squanderings ofthe people’s money. We ought to suspend that
practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the
best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our
communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing
them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.
And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land
for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction
of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too
tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country’s defense, become
the agents of our country’s destroyers, compromising on its ruin. And so
I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patnot and an
indomitable foe of strip mining, the late Joe Begley of Blackey:
“Compromise, hell!”
6
The New Roof
On the housetop, the floor of the boundless
where birds and storms fly and disappear,
and the valley opened over our heads, a leap
of clarity between the hills, we spent five days
in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on
the new, letting the sun touch for once
in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then
securing the house again in its shelter and shade.
Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history
has come between me and the sky.
7
Beechum
JackBeechum
b. 1860d.1952
RuthLightwood
b.1871d. September 1935
HamiltonBeechum
d. June 1864
MathewBeechum
d. October 1864
NancyBeechumb. 1845
BenFeltnerb. 1840
d. July 1912
ClaraBeechum
GladstonPettit
MatFeltnerb. 1884d. 1965
MargaretFenleyb. 1885d. 1969
Rebecca
Wheeler
AndrewWheeler
JamesWheeler
LeonidasWheeler
(“Uncle Peach:)
Lizzie DorieWheelerb. 1870d. 1947
MarcellusCatlettb. 1864d. 1946
Thelmab. 1899
AndrewCatlettb. 1893d. 1944
Judithd. 1962
WheelerCatlettb. 1900d. 1992
BessFeltnerb. 1908d. 1998
Flora AndrewCatlettb. 1934
HenryCatlettb. 1936
VirgilCatlettb. 1964
BettyCatlett
MarcusSettlemeyer
MargaretFeltner
b. May 17, 1945
Virgil FeltnerSettlemeyer
b. 1976
Port William Family Tree
Feltner
CoulterSimon Feltnerb. 1784 in Virginia
d. 1858
JeffersonFeltner
LetitiaMcGown
NathanCoulter
Jonas ThomassonCoulter
MasonCatlett
ElizabethCoulter
NoahCoulter
MaryCoulter
Parthenia B.b. 1835d.1917
George WashingtonCoulterb. 1826d. 1889
ErnestFinleyb. 1894d. 1945
WhitHumston
WillCatlett
Thad Coulter DavidCoulterd. 1938
ZelmaHumston
AbnerCoulter
Martha ElizabethCoulterb. 1895
JarratCoulterb. 1891d. 1965
BurleyCoulterb. 1895d. 1977
Kate HelenBranchd. 1950
VirgilFeltnerb. 1915d. 1945
Hannahb. 1922
NathanCoulterb. 1924d. 2000
TomCoulterb. 1922d. 1943
Lydab. 1933
DannyBranchb. 1932
Mathew BurleyCoulterb. 1950
CakebCoulterb. 1952
WillBranchb. 1955
RoyalBranch
CoulterBranch
FountBranch
ReubenBranch
RachelBranch
RosieBranch
though she said nothing about it when she heard
Elton get up and light the lamp and renew the fires.
He dressed and went out with the lantern to milk and
feed and harness the team. It was early March, and
she could hear the wind blowing, rattling things. She
threw the covers off and sat up on the side of the bed,
feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her head
lean down again onto her knees. But she got up, put
on her dress and sweater, and went to the kitchen.
Nor did she mention it when Elton came back in,
bringing the milk, with the smell of the barn cold in
his clothes.
“How’re you this morning?” he asked her, giving her a
pat as she strained the milk. And she said, not looking
at him, for she did not want him to know how she felt,
“Just fine.”
“You’re not hungry?” he asked.
“Not very. I’ll eat something after while.”
He put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred
rapidly with the spoon. He did not indulge himself
often, but this was one of his moments of leisure.
Mary Penn was sick,
“A Jonquil for Mary Penn”an excerpt from
10
“It was for his concentratedness… that she loved him.”
“It was for his concentratedness… that she loved him.”
He gave himself to his pleasures as concentratedly
as to his work. He was never partial about anything;
he never felt two ways at the same time. It was, she
thought, a kind of childishness in him. When he was
happy, he was entirely happy, and he could be as
entirely sad or angry. His glooms were the darkest
she had ever seen. It was for his concentratedness,
she supposed, if such a thing could be supposed
about, that she loved him. That and her yen just to
look at him, for it was wonderful to her the way he
was himself in his slightest look or gesture. She did
not understand him in everything he did, and yet she
recognized him in everything he did. She had not
been prepared—she was hardly prepared yet—for the
assent she had given to him.
He stood and pushed in his chair. She came to be
hugged as she knew he wanted her to. He started out
the door and then turned back. “Don’t worry about
the chores. I’ll be back in time to do everything.”
She took the broom from its corner by the back door
and swept and tidied up the room. They had been
able to do nothing to improve the house. But she kept
11
the house clean. She had made curtains. The bed
stands were orange crates for which she had made
skirts of the same cloth. Though the house was poor
and hard to keep, she had made it neat and homey.
It was her first house, and usually it made her happy.
But not now.
She was sick. She had a fever, she guessed, for every
motion she made seemed to carry her uneasily beyond
the vertical. She had a floaty feeling that made her
unreal to herself. And finally, when she put the broom
away, she let herself sag down into one of the chairs at
the table. She ached. She was overpoweringly tired.
She had rarely been sick and never since she married.
And now she did something else that was unlike her:
she allowed herself to feel sorry for herself.
She remembered that she and Elton had quarreled the
night before-about what. She remembered the heavy,
mostly silent force of his anger. It had been only
another of those tumultuous darknesses that came
over him as suddenly and sometimes as unaccountably
as a July storm. She was miserable, she told herself.
She was sick and alone. And perhaps the sorrow that
she felt for herself was not altogether unjustified.
She and Elton had married a year and a half earlier,
when she was seventeen and he eighteen. She had
never seen anybody like him. He had a wild way of
rejoicing, like a healthy child, singing songs, joking,
driving his old car as if he were drunk and the road
not wide enough. He could make her weak with
laughing at him. And yet he was already a man as
few men were. He had been making his own living
since he was fourteen, when he had quit school. His
father had been dead by then for five years. When a
neighbor had offered him crop ground, room, and
wages, he had taken charge of himself and, though
he was still a boy, he had become a man. He wanted,
he said, to have to say thank you to nobody. Or to
nobody but her. He would be glad, he said with a
12
“She could have put her hand into
his and walked right off the edge
of the world.
Which, in a way,is what she did.”
His memories lived in the place
like fingers locked in the rock ledges
like roots. When he died
and his influence entered the air
I said, Let my mind be the earth
of his thought, let his kindness
go ahead ofme. Though I do not escape
the history barbed in my flesh,
certain wise movements of his hands,
the turns of his speech
keep with me. His hope of peace
keeps with me in harsh days,
the shell of his breath dimming away
three summers in the earth.
large grin, to say thank you to her. And he could do
things. It was wonderful what he could accomplish
with those enormous hands of his. She could have put
her hand into his and walked right off the edge of the
world. Which, in a way, is what she did.
She had grown up in a substantial house on a good
upland farm. Her family was not wealthy, but it was
an old family, proud ofitse1f, always conscious of
its position and of its responsibility to be itself. She
had known from childhood that she would be sent to
college. Almost from childhood she had understood
that she was destined to be married to a solid
professional man, a doctor perhaps, or (and this her
mother particularly favored) perhaps a minister.
And so when she married Elton she did so without
telling her family. She already knew their judgment
of Elton: “He’s nothing.” She and Elton simply drove
A Praise
14
“Mary became a daughter to every woman in the community.”
“Mary became a daughter to every woman in the community.”down to Hargrave one late October night, awakened a
preacher, and got married, hoping that their marriage
would be accepted as an accomplished fact. They
were wrong. It was not acceptable, and it was never
going to be. She no longer belonged in that house,
her parents told her. She no longer belonged to that
family. To them it would be as if she had never lived.
It was a different world, a new world to her, that she
came into then—a world of poverty and community.
In the world that Mary Penn had given up, a place
of far larger and richer farms, work was sometimes
exchanged, but the families were conscious of
themselves in a way that set them apart from one
another. Here, in this new world, neighbors were always
working together. “Many hands make light work,”
Uncle Isham Quail loved to say, though his own old
hands were no longer able to work much.
13
This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and
took them in with a warmth that answered her
parents’ rejection. The men, without asking or being
asked, included Elton in whatever they were doing.
They told him when and where they needed him.
They came to him when he needed them. He was
an apt and able hand, and they were glad to have
his help. Mary, who had more to learn than Elton,
became a daughter to every woman in the community.
She came knowing little, barely enough to begin, and
they taught her much. Thelma, Daisy, and the two
Josies taught her their ways of cooking, cleaning, and
sewing; they taught her to can, pickle, and preserve;
they taught her to do the women’s jobs in the hog
killing. They took her on their expeditions to one
another’s houses to cook harvest meals or to gather
corn from the fields and can it.
Josie Tom was a plump, pretty, happy woman,
childless but the mother of any child in reach. Mary
Penn loved her the best, perhaps, but she loved them
all. They were only in their late thirties or early forties,
but to Mary they seemed to belong to the ageless,
eternal generation of mothers, unimaginably older
and more experienced than herself. She called them
16
Miss Josie, Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma.
They warmed and sheltered her.
When she got back into the house, she was shivering, her
teeth chattering. She unbuttoned her coat without
taking it off and sat down close to the stove. She had
much that she needed to be doing, she told herself.
She ought at least to get up and make the bed. And
she wanted to tend to the lamps; it always pleased her
to have them clean. But she did not get up. The stove’s
heat drove the cold out of her clothes, and gradually
her shivering stopped.
They had had a hard enough time of it their first
winter. They had no fuel, no food laid up. Elton had
raised a crop but no garden. He borrowed against
the crop to buy a meat hog. He cut and hauled in
firewood. He worked for wages to buy groceries, but
the times were hard and he could not always find
work. Sometimes their meals consisted of biscuits and
a gravy made of lard and flour.
And yet they were often happy. Often the world
afforded them something to laugh about. Elton stayed
alert for anything that was funny and brought the
stories home. He told her how the tickle-ass grass got
17
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?
The Man Born to Farming
“And yet they were often happy.
“And yet they were often happy.
Often the worldafforded them something
to laugh about.”
19
into Uncle Isham’s pants, and how Daisy Hample
clucked to her nearsighted husband and children like
a hen with halfgrown chicks.
But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt
herself a part without a counterpart, a mere fragment
of something unknown, dark and broken off. The
wind ranted and sucked at the house’s comers. She
could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody off
in the distance were shaking a great rug. She went
into the other room, but the fire there also needed
building up. She could not bring herself to do it. She
was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying
down. Standing near the stove, she undressed, put on
her nightgown again, and went to bed.
She lay chattering and shivering while the bedclothes
warmed around her. It seemed to her that a time
might come when sickness would be a great blessing,
for she truly did not care if she died. She thought
of Elton, caught up in the day’s wind, who could
not even look at her and see that she was sick. If she
had not been too miserable, she would have cried.
But then her thoughts began to slip away, like dishes
sliding along a table pitched as steeply as a roof. She
went to sleep.
20
When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on
the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Josie
Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight
flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she
had draped over her lap. She was humming the tune
of an old hymn, something she often did while she
was working, apparently without awareness that she
was doing it. Her voice was resonant, low, and quiet,
barely audible, as if it were coming out of the air and
she, too, were merely listening to it. The yellow flower
was nearly complete.
And so Mary knew all the story of her day. Elton,
going by Josie Tom’s in the half-light, had stopped and
called.
She could hear his voice, raised to carry through the
wind: “Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over
to Walter’s to plow.”
So he had known. He had thought of her. He had told
Josie Tom.
Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom raised her head
and smiled. “Well, are you awake? Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said. And she slept again.
21
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and ofvarious legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
Enriching the Earth
22
“…what was heaviest and
most mute is at last raised up into song.”
23
“…what was heaviest and
most mute is at last raised up into song.”
The Broken Ground
Clearing
Collected Poems: 1951-1982
The Country of Marriage
Entries
Farming: A Hand Book
Findings
Given
Openings
A Part
Sabbaths
Sayings and Doings
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (I998)
A Timbered Choir
The Wheel
Poems
24
Berry’s Complete Works
Fidelity
Hannah Coulter
Jayber Crow
The Memory of Old Jack
Nathan Coulter
A Place on Earth
Remembering
That Distant Land
Watch with Me
The Wild Birds
A World Lost
Another Turn of the Crank
The Art of the Commonplace
Citizenship Papers
A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Hidden Wound
Home Economics
Life Is a Miracle
The Long-Legged House
Recollected Essays: 1965-1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community
Standing by Words
The Unforeseen Wilderness
The Unsettling of America
What Are People For?
Fiction Essays
25
Berry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural.
(CH) New York: Harcourt, 1972.
“The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16-22.
(Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?)
The Long-Legged House. (LLH) New York: Harcourt, 1969.
Standing by Words. (SBW) San Francisco: North Point, 1983.
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San
Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986.
What Are People For? (WPF) San Francisco: North Point, 1990.
Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry
Studies 2.1 (1971): 7-15.
Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9-14.
Bibliography
26
This book was designed by Jessica Yeung in the Communication Design
studio at Washington University in St. Louis for Typograhy II.
The typeface used in this book is Baskerville.
When I falllet me fall without regret
like a leaf.