Wendell Berry - The art of loading brush : new agrarian writings

also by wendell berry

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

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford

Recollected Essays: 19651980

Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community

Standing by Words

The Unforeseen Wilderness

The Unsettling of America

The Way of Ignorance

What Are People For?

Tamed by a Bear

Coming Home to Nature-Spirit-Self

Copyright 2017 by Priscilla Stuckey

First Counterpoint hardcover edition: July 2017

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-61902-955-2

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Jacket designed by Debbie Berne

Book designed by Domini Dragoone

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Art of Loading Brush

Copyright 2017 by Wendell Berry

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used imaginatively.

ISBN: 978-1-61902-038-2

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Jacket designed by Nicole Caputo

Book designed by Tabitha Lahr

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is indebted, as most of my books have been, to my conversation with my brother, John Marshall Berry, Jr. That conversation began in earnest half a century ago and ended just a few days before he died on October 27, 2016.

Our conversation remained from beginning to end under the influence of our father, of his devotion to farming, of his work in behalf of the small farmers of our region, and of our conversation with him.

That conversation was taken up many years ago between Tanya Berry and me. It continues between us and our children and their children.

This is the conversation of agrarians and agrarianism, far larger, older, and longer than our family or any family can remember, involving some people we know, and many we dont know.

I dedicate this book to that conversation and to all of its members, once, now, and to come.

You had to be here then to be able to dont see it and dont hear it now. But I was here then, and I dont see it now...

Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men

... our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life...

C. S. Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum, Selected Literary Essays

My view is that all artists, whether they know it or not, whether they would repudiate the notion or not, are in fact showers forth of things which tend to be impoverished, or misconceived, or altogether lost or willfully set aside in the preoccupations of our present intense technological phase, but which, none the less, belong to man.

So that when asked to what end does my work proceed I can do no more than answer... thus: Perhaps it is in the maintenance of some sort of single plank in some sort of bridge.

David Jones, The Dying Gaul

We are responsible for what we remember.

John Lukacs, talking with students at the University of Louisville, March 9, 2011

Contents

Preface by Maurice Telleen

Introduction

The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age

Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend

The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

The Order of Loving Care

A Long Ancestry

The Branch Way of Doing

The Art of Loading Brush

Epilogue: What Passes, What Remains (from Sabbaths 2016 VIII)

Preface

by Maurice Telleen (in absentia)

Whatever agrarianism is, it is too important to be a mere movement.

Movements, almost by definition, are compelled to be certain or right. So it is not surprising that they tend to be self-righteous. In addition to being right they are convinced of both their inevitability and their superiority. The latter confers an aura of both practicality and pragmatism on them. Movements leave little room for meaningful dissent. They regard themselves as destiny. Movements are big on tunnel vision. Their tunnel. Their vision. So, let us agrarians give thanks that we are not part of a certified and accredited movement.

Agrarianisms natural home is the field, the garden, the stable, the prairie, the forest, the tribe, or the village... and the cottage rather than the castle. So it is little wonder that most contemporary Americans are strangers to the term, the concept, and the geography.

One reason, I believe, for its being ignored is that agrarianism isnt just about money. It might get a more respectful hearing if it were. But it is about culture, just as agriculture was about culture. Before it got run into the ditch by agribusiness.

A funny thing about cultures is that they produce people who understand more than they know. Sort of like osmosis. So the old agrarians, to get back to our subject, knew a lot about local soil, local weather, local crops, animal behavior, and each other. They depended on each other. It almost defines that much abused word, provincial. It was very provincial and no doubt carried a load of both inertia and foolishness, along with wisdom.

But whatever the mix, it was rooted in places, communities, continuity, and people whose names and faces you knew. As a matrix, it worked reasonably well. Which is different from claiming that it was idyllic and completely satisfactory.

Introduction

I

This book, like several others I have written, is intended as a part of a public conversation about the relationship of our lives, and of our communal and economic life, to the lands we live from. That no such public conversation exists presently, or has existed for the last sixty or seventy years, has never been, and is not now, an obstacle to my contribution.

Tanya Berry, my wife, says that my principal asset as a writer has been my knack for repeating myself. That insight has instructed and amused me very much, because she is right and so forthrightly right. It is true that my writings have often repeated certain movements of thought, which, as I must hope, have been made clearer by being repeated in changes of perception and context.