Wendell Berry died last week at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he farmed his land using traditional techniques and wrote with pencil and paper in a cabin lacking electricity.
Berry was celebrated for his polemics against industrial agriculture and his elegiac tributes to family farms and small-town living. But for those with no direct connection to food production or ability to move to a rural enclave, Berry’s example points toward a broader lesson: the great satisfactions of living one’s life on purpose.
As a young man, Berry set out on a path toward an elite academic career. Soon after earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Kentucky, he headed to Stanford to study creative writing, followed by a stint in Italy and France (funded by a Guggenheim fellowship). He later took a professorship at New York University’s Heights campus in the Bronx. Along the way, he got married and had two kids.
This was the situation he found himself in when, in 1964, at the age of 29, Berry made a radical decision: He would quit his job to move back to Henry County, Kentucky, where his family had lived and farmed for many generations.
Here’s how the writer David Demaree summarized what happened next:
The day he formally announced his resignation, Berry’s supervisor called him into his office. The senior faculty member must have assumed that the young Berry—not yet thirty—simply did not grasp what he was throwing away. It was one last appeal from the world he was leaving behind, to not throw away the extraordinary success before him for the obscurity—and fidelity—of Kentucky. His choice, according to Berry, amounted to ‘intellectual death; cut off from the cultural springs of the metropolis’ in the eyes of the literary world. His supervisor invoked Thomas Wolfe’s famous line, warning Berry that “you can’t go home again.” The meeting did not move Berry; his face was set like flint toward Kentucky.
Berry was driven by conviction. He wanted to write about the importance of “people and place,” and didn’t think he could do it accurately from afar.
“The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky,” he told the Times in a 2018 interview. “I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”
We live in a world increasingly defined by numbness and conveniences, largely mediated through digital technology. We use tools like AI to escape the slightest hint of cognitive strain and cue up algorithmically-masticated slop on our phones to quiet our anxious minds. Our office jobs have devolved into a Kabuki theater exercise of Slacks about emails about Zoom meetings, to be auto-transcribed and transformed into a PowerPoint that no one will read. Politics has been reduced to a childish Manichaeism that encourages us to cosplay as radicals from the safe remove of social media.
Berry understood these types of temptations. But he also realized that hardness and strain are not enemies to evade. When oriented toward an intentional vision of your life, these same challenges can yield a foundation that can withstand the inevitable storms of human existence.
In his stubborn insistence on a simple life, laser-focused on what mattered to him, Berry rejected the entire digital edifice of our 21st-century culture that increasingly constrains our lives. The lesson to take away from Berry’s 92 years is the grand possibility of rebuilding your life into something deeper.
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More on Wendell Berry
- This piece from Front Porch Republic, which I quoted above, provides a great account of Berry’s decision to embrace depth.
- Berry’s obituary in the New York Times also includes rich details.
- Dorothy Wickenden’s 2022 New Yorker profile of Berry is a classic.
- You might also like this short essay I wrote about the riverside cabin where Berry wrote.
I think about following in Berry’s footsteps just about every day now. The problem I have is I can’t possibly figure out how I’d afford to buy anything, least of all a farm (it’s still my dream, though).
Nathan Coumbe
https://nathans.blog
Hold on to the desire. It’s too early to defeat it. Desire paired with time and patience wins the day now and in the future. Life is longitudinal but the sense of it has become entirely fractured. Start with the non-material aspect of Berry’s thought…absorb and practice ‘solve for pattern’ in all your decision making. Use it as a tool to shape your life into what you desire but now seems impossible. The key is to remember not to forget and split it off because it all too hard. The key is to be clear internally what it is you really want…not the default frictionless path. It really isn’t to hard, not if your desire is driving you to do what it is you actually really want… the hard becomes the fun. If you don’t cook, learn how. For every dollar you spend eating out you have to earn 2. If there difference between fully loading your pre-tax investment opportunities (401K and Roth IRA and HSA) is the 5 dollar weekly coffee, the 9 dollar weekly sandwich, the 2 dollar weekly candy bar= $884 x 2 to earn= 1,780 that doesn’t get invested at a 35% discount with a incentive match by your employer. Now do the annual compound interest calculation to see how much money you will be missing to buy the little farm at age 50 or much sooner. For every dollar of value you can create in your home economy, there is two dollars you don’t need to earn. Love lettuces, radishes,. Parsley grow them in a pot. Start small to experience and expand your human agency into creating value in your own home economy. This is entirely a creative and generative process that is fun and if allowed to, it will increase in momentum and thoroughly enrich your life. Find a good partner…wives work…a women who gets it. This approach beginning in 2000, led my brand new wife and I, from a 4’x4′ backyard garden, to a 44,000 square food organic farm leased from City of Philly and a very profitable organic farming business in Philly in 5 years. Yes we worked like slaves but it was ours. And so was the 14,000lbs of organic produce a year. I did this with a full time corporate job in my spare time 4AM-7AM. raising two babies. Within 5 years we moved onto a few acres of land….and established a small orchard, large garden for our own use. We taught our selves how to make many high value products we love, growing 40% of our food budget for a family of 4………..all while working that corporate job….now finally retiring. Our home economy products: eggs, apples, apple cider, Hard cider, dried applie rings, Blackberry elderberry port, Belgian ales, picked everything, sauerkraut, Bags of frozen vegetables, fresh vegetables, Canned and dried vegetable of every kind. Garlic, onions, Thai green curry paste, pesto, Jerk paste, ‘buckwheat flour, malting barley, Blue berries, Strawberries, Elderberries, blackberries, peaches, goose berries, currents, fresh pasta, 60 lbs of dried beans, hot sauces, Salsa, Tomatoes sauces, apple sauces, fruit pies pies, ..jams of all types, crepes, potatoes….Almadine, French fingerling, German butterball, Kennebec, purple…150 lbs. We trade produce for fresh milk and free range chickens. We started out not having a clue what we were doing. I also raise tobacco and process it for pipe smoking and cigar rolling. The cigar rolling is a new endeavor….maybe it will work.. I have also done a ton of lacto soda…..not much anymore. The list is endless…. hazelnut butter….that was a trick figuring out how to get those little nuts and shells apart. The orchard provides all the wood I need for cooking out…who needs a grill. LOL
I can’t imagine how he afforded to pay property taxes and pay for veterinary care for livestock, hospital bills and Medicare premium payments. It would be interesting to understand if he was living off the mother pig.
If you really think I quote “We live in a world…” Such nonsense. Just put your blog down and get a life.
Thank you for reading, John. What part of this article do you disagree with? I really enjoy reading these articles and never get the sense that he doesn’t have a life.