I treasure the distinct memory of reading Wendell Berry for the first time. It must have been sometime in 2015, because it coincided with my reading of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’.
Berry had been on my list for a good while – I’d come across his name in more than one place in some other reading I had, always cited favourably in footnotes, but never the direct object of any particular study. I had completed a Master’s thesis in 2014 on the work of David L. Schindler, and was eager to turn my attention to some fiction. Somehow I had procured a copy of Berry’s great novel Jayber Crow (which remains my favourite), and I was hooked.
For those who are uninitiated, Berry was a farmer and conservationist, but also a great author of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. Since his death earlier this month the various newsletters and feeds that end up in my inbox have been brimming with various obituaries, appreciations, and recollections of him, and I am glad to add mine now to their number. Berry was a man of unique insight – he had a clarity of vision that it seems to me is only possible for someone who has cultivated serious habits of attention.
There are some great reflections on his life and work, and I’d recommend you take a read, here, here, and here.
I thought I would use this outlet to share something of the impact that my reading of Berry has had on me, with a view to illustrating the power of the story.
I mentioned how my reading both Laudato Si’ and Jayber Crow coincided in 2015. It was fortuitous and likely providential. I was always going to read Pope Francis’ encyclical, and I was already on-board intellectually speaking. His critique of technology, what he termed the technocratic paradigm, was familiar enough from my reading of both Martin Heidegger’s essay on technology, and the works Romano Guardini (as well as more contemporary authors like George Grant, David L. Schindler, and Michael Hanby). Francis’ emphasis on the unity of creation, and the link between the abuse of the environment and of human persons was all familiar territory.
I was, as I mentioned, already on-board intellectually with the ecological thrust of Francis’ encyclical. But despite this, suburban boy that I am, I was still somewhat rather disconnected from these ideas on a more existential level. I was in need of what Pope Francis called an ‘ecological conversion.’ Enter Wendell Berry.
Berry’s wonderful Port William stories, both the novels and the short stories are really tremendous. Through them one gets to see and experience modernity encroach on the small fictional town. I was struck by how Berry depicted the way that something as seemingly simple as transport effected a movement to abstraction, that saw a kind of flight from the particular, a theme that is so prevalent in Berry’s thought, and which grounded a great deal of both his in conservation, as well as his cultural criticism.
Reading the Port William stories, but particularly Jayber Crow, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of what some have called anemoia, that is a feeling of nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known. I have never visited any small town in rural Kentucky. I have zero experience on a farm, or as a barber, nor can I relay to you the tremendous significance of the difference a highway makes in small-town USA, especially for someone who has grown up without much exposure to a car. But reading Berry’s fictional works gave me a real appreciation for some of what has been lost, and not in a trite way, but a genuine awareness of the goods that have been diminished by virtue of modern conveniences. Simply by challenging the contemporary orthodoxy of ‘progress’, Berry’s work has been dismissed by some critics as hopelessly nostalgic, and while I can understand this criticism, I do not agree with wholly with it. Berry instead opens up avenues of thought that challenge the inevitability these of modern technocracy.
In reading Berry my imagination caught fire, and many of the ideas that Pope Francis had proposed in his encyclical—ideas that I had had no problem accepting intellectually—became both real possibilities, and tremendous challenges.
While I certainly did not agree with everything Berry wrote in his fruitful lifetime, reading his work has always been an invitation to think. His art remains a powerful tool in the work of bringing people to the truth, what we call evangelisation and in this his work is exemplary of the kind of art we need, what another Pope, St John Paul II spoke of in his Letter to Artists:
In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery. (Letter to Artists, n. 12)
