The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Berry, Life Story of Jayber Crow, n.p. 2. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, xxv. 3. “Dante,” in Berry, Given, 8. 4. “Imagination in Place,” in Berry, Way of Ignorance, 50–51. 5. See, e.g., Thoreau’s point that “to cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together” (Walden, 115). 6. Cf. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 46. 7. “Preface,” in Berry, Way of Ignorance, x. 8. “The Loss of the University,” in Berry, Home Economics, 91–92 (LU hereafter). 9. “Discipline and Hope,” in Berry, Continuous Harmony, 124–25 (DH hereafter). 10. “The Gift of Good Land,” in Berry, Gift of Good Land, 274 (hereafter GGL). 11. GGL, 273. 12. “The Hurt Man (1888),” in Berry, That Distant Land, 10. 13. Berry, Remembering, 154. 14. James, “Art of Fiction,” 399. 15. Berry, Life Is a Miracle, 118 (LM hereafter). For Berry’s objection to Wilson’s claim that works of art or literature can be explained according to the laws of biology or physics, see LM, 105–19. I treat these matters in chapter 3 of this book. 16. On agrarianism, the new agrarianism, and the relationship of both to Berry, a helpful beginning list would include the following: Carlson, New Agrarian Mind; Freyfogle, New Agrarianism; Wirzba, Essential Agrarian Reader; and Smith, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition. I’ll Take My Stand is, of course, an essential source. For a very helpful gathering of agrarian writings by Berry, see Art of the Commonplace. Wirzba’s introduction to that volume, “The Challenge of Berry’s 270 Notes to Pages 6–14 Agrarian Vision,” is a good place to begin the process of thinking about how agrarianism can become a vital source of change for people who are not primarily farmers —something taken up, in fact, by many of the pieces collected in the readers edited by Freyfogle and by Wirzba. 17. Wirzba, “Introduction: Why Agrarianism Matters,” 4. 18. Wirzba, “Introduction: Why Agrarianism Matters,” 4. Berry comments on our not yet being “authentically settled” in America in “The Whole Horse,” in Berry, Citizenship Papers, 119. 19. Berry, Leavings, 49. 20. LU, 96. 1. Practices, Particulars, and Virtues 1. “A Native Hill,” in Berry, Long-Legged House, 171–72 (NH hereafter, cited in the text). For biographical material on Berry, see Angyal, Wendell Berry, which takes a chronological approach, as Goodrich does partially, too, in Unforeseen Self. Also valuable are the chronologies in Grubbs, Conversations with Wendell Berry, xvii–xx; and in Peters, Wendell Berry, 325–28. The interviews collected in Conversations offer many details, as do the delightful pieces by friends of Berry’s collected by Peters. 2. In the “Economy” chapter of Walden, Thoreau remarks, “In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line” (59). But closer in spirit to Berry’s comment that he was born “barely in the nick of time” is Thoreau’s saying, “I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too” (Journal, 160). Part of this quote is cited by Walter Harding at the beginning of The Days of Henry Thoreau (3). For Thoreau’s saying “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” see “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” in Walden, 135 (hereafter cited in the text). 3. Deneen, “Wendell Berry and the Alternative Tradition,” 312. 4. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 187 (AV hereafter, cited in the text). 5. “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in Berry, What Are People For? 193 (FBM hereafter, cited in the text). 6. “The Unsettling of America,” in Berry, Unsettling of America, 9 (UA hereafter , cited in the text). 7. “Renewing Husbandry,” in Berry, Way of Ignorance, 91 (RH hereafter, cited in the text). 8. For the way working with animals puts one in a living world in a way that Notes to Pages 14–20 271 riding a tractor does not, see Berry’s letter to Wes Jackson of Nov. 11, 1980: “As one who has farmed with both tractors and teams, I...