Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder letters reviewed

Reaching out from their individual perspectives, Berry and Snyder consider the world from each other’s viewpoint with startling vulnerability. Revealed here is a brand of curiosity that can seem all but absent from modern social discourse, given our tedious devotion to the over-specialization of opinions, to a dull intellectual territorialism. Indeed, having read a 1977 interview with Snyder in the East West Journal, Berry notes that Snyder’s words formed a powerful suggestion that “thought might proceed — instead of by argument, dialectic — by people speaking for, clarifying, confirming one another’s experience.”

Moreover, throughout the correspondence in this collection, from 1973 to 2013, the friends seem to keep each other in a delicious state of flux, their vitality growing by virtue of their willingness to put as much priority on questions as answers.

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