Reason and Revelation

Wendell Berry is one of our most admired and renowned writers, the author at my last count of thirty-two books: poems, essays, stories, and novels. He has been recognized with grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Lannan foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the Academy of American Poets and of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he is widely known and respected as a writer, teacher, conservationist, public speaker, and farmer. Though I have read his poems and essays over the years, I only recently heard him speak; his spoken voice is, like his written voice, warm and friendly, straightforward, reasonable, and quietly but firmly authoritative. Berry’s authority is at once of the intellect and of the senses. His evenhanded logic is supported by the facts and—often more convincing—by the truths of physical experience.

For Berry the life of the mind is not separate from the life of the body. Having learned the art of sustainable agriculture while growing up on a small Kentucky farm, after a few years elsewhere he returned to his native Henry County, where he and his wife, Tanya, have lived, farmed, and raised two children, and where he has continued to write for over four decades.

In the preface to The Way of Ignorance, Berry’s latest collection of essays, he illuminates the title: “the essays and speeches in this book have been written with the understanding, hardly a novelty, that our ignorance ultimately is irremediable, that some problems are unsolvable and some questions unanswerable—that, do what we will, we are never going to be free of mortality, partiality, fallibility, and error.” He continues: “Because ignorance is thus a part of our creaturely definition, we need an appropriate way: a way of ignorance, which is the way of neighborly love, kindness, caution, care, appropriate scale, thrift, good work, right livelihood.” The essays here gathered together talk about all those ways of being and a good deal more, but from that list “neighborly love” and “appropriate scale” hover most powerfully over the entire collection. There is nothing vague or soft about Berry’s sense of neighborly love; rooted in local community and often in physical labor, neighborly love can be further understood as it expands to include neighboring states, regions, or nations.

Wendell Berry finds the extraordinary in the most unlikely, often ordinary, subjects. These essays first appeared in publications as disparate as Draft Horse Journal and Playboy. Several were written originally as speeches delivered to groups as various as the Kentucky Environmental Quality Commission, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Crop Science Society, the Land Institute, the Lexington Theological Seminary, and the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky. One might expect such speeches to be of interest mainly to specialists, to be full of the dry lingo of environmentalists, preservationists, crop scientists, farmers, ag school teachers, and theologians; but such an expectation reflects the very attitudes and stereotypes the speeches expose and explode.

Most artists come to realize that the more particular their work is, the more universal it can become. A first-rate poet and storyteller, Wendell Berry bloods his abstractions. In addition to the common sense and eloquence of Berry’s reasoning, the vividness of his observations and the quiet authority of his voice give these essays a compelling immediacy. When I can hear his written voice, I forget I’m reading and join an extended conversation with a genuinely wise man—a prophet, I often think. Berry does not sugarcoat, he does not sidestep. His beliefs are deeply held, yet he welcomes disagreement. Even as he condemns efforts to conquer nature rather than live in harmony with it, even as he attacks corporate greed, he is not condescending. Confident of the truths he extols, he is as even-handed as Solomon. Throughout The Way of Ignorance I hear the voice of a caring counselor, an advocate for what is reasonable and right. I speculate Berry could sit down and negotiate with Satan, hold his...