He wrote 50 books with a pencil on land his family had worked since 1803. When he died Monday at 92, people who agree on nothing grieved together.
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to do your own business, and to work with your own hands.
1 Thessalonians 4:11
On August 31, Wendell Berry died at home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at 92, on land his family had worked since 1803. He left an NYU professorship at 30 to farm it, writing later that he "had come back to stay." He did, for six decades: some 50 books in pencil, typed on a typewriter bought new in 1956. He never owned a computer.
Environmentalists are grieving the man who fought industrial agriculture. Conservatives who left Washington for home are grieving the man who sent them. People who agree on nothing agreed to love him. The eulogies for a man who refused screens rise from keyboards and phones.
His advice, when NPR pried it out of him in 1998: "stop some place, and stay there. Learn the history of it, and the names of the plants and animals and the neighbors." He called the people bound to his corner of Kentucky "the membership," and he meant the word the way a church means it.
In a country where leaving is the price of success, he made staying a discipline of faith.
Paul was writing to a young church so sure the world was ending that ordinary work felt beneath the moment. His counsel reads like a contradiction, ambition pointed at smallness. Berry staked sixty years on it.
Micah 4:4But they will sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and no one will make them afraid: For the mouth of Yahweh of Armies has spoken.
That is the prophets' final scene, the reward at the far end of history. What stops you is how small it is. A patch of ground, fruit trees, neighbors with nothing to fear. Berry lived as if it were worth rehearsing early.
He told Bill Moyers in 2013 that much of his writing had been "a giving of thanks for precious things." The tributes this week are the same kind of writing, aimed back at him. Front Porch Republic said goodbye with Milton: to the faithful, death is the gate of life. Faithful was always his word. It turns out you can reach that gate without ever leaving home.