I first heard about Wendell Berry a decade ago in a sustainable agriculture course, which meant I was surprised to later hear that he was most known for his writing.
In 2012, I was lucky enough to be living in DC when Wendell Berry gave the Jefferson Lecture, the highest federal honor bestowed to those in the arts and humanities. His lecture, titled “It All Turns On Affection” and can be watched here, left me moved and curious.
He defines affection as “such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.” Then digs into a culture and economy of indifference. A culture that is impersonal despite being globally connected. An economy that disregards human and natural limits while giving corporations a share of everybody’s income with no local commitment. He argues that we are complicit in maintaining that culture and economy because the majority of us no longer have a connection to the land and raw materials at the source. His personal experience in central Kentucky is true to my experience growing up in a city:
In my region and within my memory, for example, human life has become less creaturely and more engineered, less familiar and more remote from local places, pleasures, and associations. Our knowledge, in short, has become increasingly statistical.
In addition to his stories and experiences, his questions moved me and still make me think:
Can we—and, if we can, how can we—make actual in our minds the sometimes urgent things we say we know?
What technology can replace personal privacy or the coherence of a family or a community?
Why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage “to strengthen the economy”?
His lecture nearly ends with this summary:
Without this informed, practical, and practiced affection, the nation and its economy will conquer and destroy the country.
His 2012 lecture started with a reading from his book Leavings. I started my search for a poem by picking up that book for my #30for30 challenge. I chose this poem to memorize:
A SPEECH TO THE GARDEN CLUB OF AMERICA by
Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.
17. Find a poem that means something to you and memorize it
