I was sad to hear of the death of Wendell Berry on Monday. But why should I be sad? He was 92 and had lived a good life, mostly on his own terms, from what I could see. But the death felt like "one of the greats has left us" moments. I remember reading him in college, so his writing has been with me a long time.
Back in my undergraduate days, I felt somewhat embarrassed for liking someone whose work was so accessible. Now, of course, I think it's one of his more important traits. Berry's work has seemed vital for decades now.
What I value most these days is his ability to never sink into gloom for too long. He manages to sound prophetic (one of the prophet's duties being to call people back to right living, as well as to warn), without setting up a house in the land of the apocalypse. He always comes back to one of his main themes: ". . . hope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found. For one thing, though we have caused the earth to be seriously diseased, it is not yet without health. The earth we have before us now is still abounding and beautiful" ("Conservation and Local Economy" from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 11).
He wrote those words almost 20 years ago, and yet, they still have relevance. Some days, when the news seems unrelentingly bad, it's hard to continue to hope. But it's one of the more important activities we can undertake.
Here's a passage that reminds us of the miracles which surround us each day: "Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine--which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes" ("Christianity and the Survival of Creation" from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 103).
That passage made me gasp when I first read it, and it still does.
As I was looking over old blog posts about him, I came across this one that I wrote after reading Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder. It made me want to read the book again. It seems a fitting read for this tim of so much loss of greatness.
