Novelist and poet Wendell Berry spent his life farming his land for food and for prose. It was land his family farmed and lived on for seven generations before him, in Henry County Kentucky.
He died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky at age 92.
…
Berry’s writing was an endeavor in slowing down, and noticing his surroundings – whether these were trees, people, or the imprint of a breeze on a hill – as in the 2001 poem “June Wind.”
"Light and wind are running
Over the headed grass
As though the hill had
Melted and now flowed."
…
One of his most famous poems is “The Peace of Wild Things”
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I first read him when Culture and Agriculture was fairly new. — I always think of it as that, but that’s the subtitle; the actual title is The Unsettling of America. I’ve been feeling pretty unsettled about America lately; losing Berry isn’t going to help.
I have loved Berry’s writing for a long time. I previously quoted this beautiful poem here.
I was under the impression that “The Peace of Wild Things” was from one of his essays, later turned into a poem, but I could be mistaken. Here are a few other snippets from his writings:
“Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
“After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: A Novel
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House
And, definitely a comment suitable for our times:
“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
