Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

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In the sidebar to your right under Content, you will find pages with links and lists related to Mr. Berry's work.

This website is not owned, operated or sanctioned by Mr. Berry, whose disapproval of computer technology is well-documented.

The one person responsible for all of this is me, Br. Tom Murphy (btwb@brtom.org). All opinions expressed within posts— outside of quoted content—are also only mine. I am not a personal friend or employee of Mr. Berry and am thus not able to arrange interviews or appearances by him.

Please note that most of the posts below will refer you to a larger article. Just click on the "via" link at the lower left side of each post.

Works: Generic lists specific essays within collections.

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from "Google Privacy and a Wendell Berry Poem"

So, what to do? Wendell Berry knew, way before Google existed:

So, friends, every day do something that won't compute.  Love the Lord.  Love the world.  Work for nothing.  Take all you have and be poor.  Love someone who does not deserve it.  Denounce the government and embrace the flag.  Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

And he has some advice for us about how to know what is right in a world with so many questions:

Expect the end of the world.  Laugh.  Laughter is immeasurable.  Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.  So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.  Ask youself:  Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?  Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?

via www.nodepression.com

from "The Place of Wendell Berry: Nature Writing in America"

His topics: agriculture, war, coal mining, nuclear power. His stance (simplified here, of course): love the land, be of the land, love each other. Berry, to me, feels like a conglomeration of his peers. He has Carson’s mastery of fact and research, Krutch’s fascination with the evocative moments nature provides, Hoagland’s gentle and non-judgemental observations, and, yes, wrapped in the same bundle, Abbey’s radical streak. Just a year ago, in February, 2011, at age 76, Berry participated in a sit-in to protest mountaintop removal coal mining in his native Kentucky.

via numerocinqmagazine.com

Wendell Berry on Civil Disobedience (The Progressive)

I have always been suspicious of people who seem to devote their entire lives to forms of protest. We all ought to have better things to do. Ken Kesey once said that the reason not to resist evil is that such resistance is dependent on evil; it makes you dependent on evil. He was right. And Edward Abbey said that saving the world is a good hobby—though he worked hard to save at least parts of it. As for me, the older I get, the less happy I am to leave home. All the places I go seem to be getting farther away. Frankfort, Kentucky, now appears as far off as the planet Saturn, and I wish it more remote.

via www.progressive.org

Of Interest: Wendell Berry noted in "The Soul of Slow Food"

When my fiancée, Juliana, and I were farming, we grew the most beautiful produce I have ever seen. I do not mean to brag. It is sort of like being a parent, or a pet owner. Anyone who has grown food with love probably feels that way about the product of his or her labor. We grew 300 varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers, many heirloom varieties, and ingredients for cooking food from so many traditions. We sold them at a farmers' market in a well-heeled neighborhood, and we charged a lot of money. We did not think twice about charging $16 per pound for salad greens. We knew what work went into it, we knew how good it was, and we knew it was worth it. We sold out. And we made $12,000 a year between the two of us. We thought we were doing pretty well.

When low-income people came to our stand with food stamps, we gave them two or three for the price of one. But something was broken. At $12,000, we had low incomes ourselves, and the only people we could feed had high incomes. I wanted to change the world, and I saw farming as a piece of that work. Fairness for the farmer seemed to mean injustice for the eater. Fairness for the eater seemed to mean injustice for the farmer. How could we simply choose to fight for one, with the knowledge that it undercut the other?

via www.theatlantic.com

from "Photography, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner and The Great Community"

While reading Wendell Berry’s essay, “Wallace Stegner and The Great Community” I found the following quote by a Stegner from his essay, “The Book and the Great Community” worth further contemplation.

“Thought is neither instant nor noisy…It thrives best in solitude, in quite, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to re-assert some aspect of it, or attack it.”

The first half of the quote, “thought is neither instant or noisy,” I consider an expectation. Those words ask that I wake up earlier than absolutely necessary in the mornings and dedicate time to contemplation, to reading and writing, and to working on my photography.

via camerareality.com

"What Happens When a City Girl Reads Wendell Berry"

I wasn’t intellectually persuaded by Mr.Berry. Rather my heart was reordered. He helped me to love that which I had previously found unloveable. And I knew, on some deep level, that all of the trappings of modernity, that which I had held to be superior, were really the cause of all my feelings of isolation and alienation and fragmentation. At last I had discovered what my soul was missing. And I was faced with the great irony that my whole life I had been celebrating the death of the very things that were, in fact, life.

via circeinstitute.com

Wendell Berry contrasted to Occupy Dartmouth

I mention Berry because Berry is a man who has ruthlessly lived out his values. He became convinced that living normally in the modern economy is morally illicit and so he has decided to live in a radically different way. I wish I could say the same about the Occupiers.  

The panel, conducted a few days ago, was full of the usual Occupy silliness. It was incoherent from the start. It was meant to be a panel on the intersection of spirituality and the Occupy Movement, but hardly any mention of religion was made at all. At the beginning, all the students who were involved in the Occupy movement were asked to stand up to be applauded. They were praised for engaging the community in "meaningful dialogue" (what dialogue?) The fact that literally nothing has changed because they wanted to hang out in tents for a few weeks was passed over. 

via dartreview.com