Wendell Berry Remembered

Wendell Berry passed away yesterday at the age of 92. There are others who will undoubtedly write more eloquently about him than I will be able to, but The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry has been a book I’ve come back to several times since first picking it up a few years ago.

Berry falls into the category of people who achieved something truly significant; they not only held strong beliefs about how one should live, but they lived them out without reservation. Referring to someone as an “agrarian intellectual” may seem like a contradiction in terms, but it is the only description I can think of that fits Berry. While he is a writer who I wish to read more of, what I have read of him paints a picture of a man who had a true fascination with our physical world, and a conviction that depth and meaning in life are created through our interactions with physical space and time, and not concerning ourselves with the moving of pixels on screens.

Berry was, as it turned out, prophetic in a number of ways, warning of the decay of our physical communities for example far before our loneliness and isolation gained a sympathetic audience, and in a 1987 essay he emphatically expressed his rationale for not purchasing a computer, a decision as I understand it he never diverted from.

To put it simply, Berry is someone I wish to have met, and while living to the age of 92 is something I’d sign up for tomorrow, his loss will be felt nonetheless.

To close, I’m including a passage from one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems, The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound…

— Wendell Berry