wendell berry selected works from

river’s rising

river’s rising

Berry’s artistic vision of agricultural work is diametrically

opposed to the industrial vision which maximizes agricultural

mechanization in order to minimize human interaction with

and care of the land. Separating humans as far as possible

from Nature in practice has created a character-killing and

“community-killing agriculture, with its monomania

of bigness”.

The modern linear view of progress not only has destroyed

many of America’s farmlands; it also has been the driving

force behind strip mining, deforestation, pollution, and has

widened the gap between culture and nature. The current

natural resource crisis, in Berry’s view, is a direct consequence

of our character, and thus the only real hope lies in the change

of attitudes.

Aside from our suicidal depletion of natural resources, one

of Berry’s concerns is that our attitude towards the land

wendell berry necessitates our estrangement from it. Berry has said that

“my sense of values comes from what I’m rooted in, what

I believe in”. To him, Nature, more specifically, the Nature

of his particular place, serves as a moral teacher. In “The

Nature Consumers,” an essay in The Long-Legged House,

Berry explains one of the dangers inherent in our longing to

separate ourselves from the land:

Man cannot be independent of nature. In one way or

another he must live in relation to it, and there are only two

alternatives: the way of the frontiersman, whose response

to nature was to dominate it, to assert his presence in it by

destroying it; or the way of Thoreau, who went to natural

places to become quiet in them, to learn from them, to be

restored by them. To know these places, because to know

them is to need them and respect them and be humble

before the, is to preserve them. To fail to know them, because

ignorance can only be greedy of them, is to destroy them.

It is a day of the earth's renewing without any man's doing or

help.

Though I have fields I do not go out to work in them.

Though I have crops standing in rows I do not go out to look at them or

gather what has ripened or hoe the weeds

from the balks.

Though I have animals I stay dry in the house while they graze

in the wet.

Though I have buildings they stand closed under their roofs.

Though I have fences they go without me.

My life stands in place, covered, like a hayrick or a mushroom.

the rain 2 - 3

To moralize the state, they drag out a man, and bind

his hands, and darken his eyes with a black rag to be

free of the light in them, and tie him to a post,

and kill him.

And I am sickened by complicity in my race. To kill

in hot savagery like a beast is understandable.

It is forgivable and curable. But to kill by design,

deliberately, without wrath, that is the sullen labor

that perfects Hell.

The serpent is gentle, compared to man. It is man, the

inventor of cold violence, death as waste, who has

the morning’s news

“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it,

or to escape what is bad in it,

made himself lonely among the creatures, and set

himself aside, so that he cannot work in the sun with

hope, or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.

The morning’s news drives sleep out ofthe head at

night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes open to

the dark. Weary, we lie awake in the agony of the old

giving birth to the new without assurance that the

new will be better.

but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,

they are so open to the world. I look at my sloping fields

now turning green with the young grass of April. What

must I do to go free? I think I must put on a deathlier

knowledge, and prepare to die rather than enter into

the design of man’s hate. I will purge my mind ofthe

airy claims of church and state. I will serve the earth

and not pretend my life could better serve. Another

morning comes with its strange cure.

The earth is news.

Though the river floods and the spring is cold, my

heart goes on, faithful to a mystery in a cloud, and the

summer's garden continues its descent through me,

toward the ground.

4 - 5

At his best, Elton was a man in love with her but not

just with her. He was in love too with the world, with

their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with

his own life, with farming. At those times she lived

inn his love as in a spacious house. Walter Cotman

always spoke of Mary as Elton’s “better half” In spite

of his sulks and silences, she would not go so far as

“better.” That she was his half, she had no doubt at

all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous

ache that she completed him, just as she knew with

the same joy that she needed him and he completed

her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a

half, to be completed by such another half? When had

excerpt from

a jonquil for mary penn

there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each

other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole?

And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness

came upon them as a rush of light, around them and

within them, so that she felt they must be shining in

the dark.

But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt

herself a part without counterpart, a mere fragment of

Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.”

“

Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.”

something unknown, dark and broken off. The fire had

burned low in the stove. Though she still wore her coat,

she was chilled again and shaking. For a long time,

perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now

misery alerted her again to the room. 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 felt, not a draft, but the

whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against

her. 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.

6 - 7

She went to sleep.

march 22, 1968

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

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

8 - 9

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

compromise hell

It is commonly understood that governments

are instituted to provide certain protections that

citizens individually cannot provide for them- selves.

But governments have tended to assume that this

responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and

the military services. They have used their regulatory

powers reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments

have only occasionally recognized the need of land and

people to be protected against economic violence. It is

true that economic violenceis not always as swift, and

is rarely as bloody, as the violence ofwar, but it can be

devastating nonetheless. Acts ofeconomic aggression

can destroy a landscape or a community or the center

ofa town or city, and they routinely do so. Such damage

is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their

political abettors in the name ofthe “free market”

and “free enterprise,” but this is a freedom that

makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it

destroys the freedom of other people along with their

communities and livelihoods. There are such things

as economic weapons of massive destruction. We

have allowed them to be used against us, not just by

public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but

also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances

impossible to justify.

We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act

in our own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful

and bountiful countryside has long been a colony

of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations,

yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw

materials at an immense cost to our land and our

land’s people. Because of that failure also, our towns

and cities.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

Because as individuals or even as communities we

cannot protect ourselves against these aggressions,

we need our state and national governments to

protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice from

our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the

small merchant deserve the same economicjustice,

thesamefreedominthemarket,asbigfarmersandcha

in stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because

their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to

undersell them.

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

10 - 11of 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. Somehow we have lost or discarded

any controlling sense of the interdependence ofthe

Earth and the human capacity to use it well. The

governmental obligation to protect these economic

resources, inseparably human and natural, is the

same as the obligation to protect us from hunger or

from foreign invaders. In result, there is no difference

between a domestic threat to the sources of our life

and a foreign one

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.

To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.

12 - 13

In a country without saints or

shrines I knew one who made his

pilgrimage to springs, where in his

life's dry years his mind held on.

Everlasting, people called them,

and gave them names. The water

broke into sounds and shinings

at the vein mouth, bearing the

taste ofthe place, the deep rock,

sweetness out of the dark.

the springs 14 - 15

He bent and drank in bondage to the ground.

contempt of small places

The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on the health of small streams;

the health of small streams depends on the health of their watersheds.

The health of the water is exactly the same as the health of the land; the health of small places is exactly the same as the health of

large places. As we know, disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in force everywhere, infections move.

16 - 17

We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt

for small places and small streams. Small destructions add up, and finally

they are understood collectively as large destructions. Excessive nutrient

runoff from farms and animal factories in the Mississippi watershed

has caused, in the Gulf of Mexico, a hypoxic or "dead zone" of five or six

thousand square miles. In forty-odd years, strip mining in the Appalachian

coal fields, culminating in mountain removal, has gone far toward the

destruction of a whole region, with untold damage to the region's people,

to watersheds, and to the waters downstream.

There is not a more exemplary history of our contempt for small places

than that of Eastern Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many

absentee corporate shareholders and left the region impoverished and

defaced. Coal industry representatives are now defending mountain

removal and its attendant damage to forests, streams, wells, dwellings,

roads, and community life by saying that in "10, 15, 20 years "the land will

be restored, and that such mining has “created the [level] land” needed for

further industrial development.

But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the

forest, and you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the

watershed. These things are not to be restored in ten or twenty years,

or in ten or twenty hundred years. As for the manufacture of level places

for industrial development, the supply has already far exceeded any

foreseeable demand. And the devastation continues.

The contradictions in the state’s effort “to balance the competing

interests” were stated as follows by Ewell Balltrip, director of the

Kentucky Appalachian Commission: “If you don’t have mining, you don’t

have an economy, and ifyou don’t have an economy you don’t have a way

for the people to live. But if you don’t have environmental quality, you

won’t create the kind ofplace where people want to live.”

Yes. And if the clearly foreseeable result is a region of flat industrial sites

where nobody wants to live, we need a better economy.

a wet time

The land is an ark, full of things waiting.

Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks

filling with water as the foot is raised.

The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands

become obscure in their use, prehistoric.

The mind passes over changed surfaces

like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs

and to the thought of swimming and wading birds.

Along the river croplands and gardens

are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark

planted to measure the rise, the water rising,

the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood

passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots

drag the bottom. I was not ready for this parting, my native land putting out to sea.

20 - 21

and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch

holding the new nest of the hummingbird

the river flows heavy with earth, the water

turned the color of broken slopes. I stand

deep in the mud of the shore, a stake

To know the inhabiting reasons of

trees and streams, old men who shed their lives on the world like leaves,

I watch them go. And I go.

I build the place of my leaving.

The days arc into vision like fish

leaping, their shining caught in the

stream.

I watch them go in homage and sorrow.

for the rebuilding of a house

I build the place of my dream.

I build the place of my leaving

that the dark may come clean.

22 - 23

fiction poetry essaysFidelity

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

The Broken Ground

Clearing

Collected Poems: 1951-19882

The Country of Marriage

Entries

Farming: A Hand Book

Findings

Given

Openings

A Part

Sabbaths

Sayings and Doings

The Selected Poems of

Wendell Berry (1998)

A Timbered Choir

The Wheel

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

other works by wendell berry:

24 - 25

Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee is a Communication Design student

at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington

University in St. Louis For information please contact Gabrielle

LaMarr LeMee at glamarr@go.wustl.edu.

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.

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986.

Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and Myth Again.” The Southern Review 20 (1984): 958-68

Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9-14.

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