Recollected Essays 1965–1980 by Wendell Berry (review)

Reviews Recollected. Essays 1965-1980. By Wendell Berry. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. 340 pages, $7.50.) E. B. White once suggested the greater wisdom in giving a college graduate Thoreau’s Walden instead of a diploma. The same thought struck me as I read Wendell Berry’s collection of essays. Not that he rivals Thoreau in artistry, wit, and philosophical depth. Yet Berry’s book is full of wisdom, the kind today’s outsetting citizen needs not only for enhanced citizenship but for humanness itself. It’s a book to give away and to keep. Eleven essays make the collection, a fine compendium of The LongLegged House (1969), The Hidden Wound (1970), A Continuous Harmony (1972), The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971), and The Unsettling of America (1977) in that order. In a final essay that serves as a coda — “The Makings of a Marginal Farm,” first published by The Smithsonian in 1980 — Berry writes: “In coming home and settling on this place, I began to live in my subject.” (p. 337) Returning to his Kentucky farm, which had been his father’s and grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s, Berry finds a haunting depth of meaning to the words “home” and “live.” His book indeed bears the unwritten subtitle, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For.” His dis­ coveries and testimonies are his subject, his words, his heart and mind. He returned from study and travel abroad, from a faculty position at New York University, eventually from a similar position at the University of Kentucky. He returned to Port Royal, sixty miles from Lexington, and to the family farm of his childhood. He returned home, determined to know as if for the first time its real abundance and richness. He listened to his kinsmen and neighbors, and learned the names of plants and animals and natural processes and local places. At the same time his language increased and strengthened, and sent his mind, like a live root system, into the place he called home. His mind, he said, “became the root of my life rather than its sublimation.” (p. 79) The reader could not have a better definition of true regional writing. Berry returned, determined to know the Kentucky River, the Red River Gorge, the surrounding hills and valleys — first with the help of maps and natural histories, also with the help of other minds including Thoreau, 264 Western American Literature Shakespeare, Jesus, and Homer. But the real homecoming, described in “The Journey’s End,” occurred when he was totally alone. One day while exploring the Gorge he lost his map. “At first I am sorry, for on these trips I have always kept it with me.” (p. 265) But with the lost map comes a discovery, a highly symbolic event, “the culmination, the final insight” — namely, the cleansing, freeing vision of creation itself. “It is a great Work. It is a great Work.” (p. 262) Creation is Berry’s theme. The clue is connection, wholeness, health, holiness, never as an order we impose but one within creation itself, an order sustained by its various parts and energies. His theme, although simply stated, is nevertheless complex, extending not only to the predictable lyricism of the natural world where days are full of sabbaths and where flowers resemble “Easter gone wild.” (p. 226). Berry also finds analogies of order and wholeness in memory (the dynamic within consciousness), especially in the richness of his childhood, now given resonance that only time and growth and wisdom can supply. Moreover, wholeness embraces human relationships (his ideas concerning marriage and fidelity make profound sense). Urgent as these topics are, Berry’s most frequent subject is the earth itself. Much can be reviewed here; let his own summation suffice: “There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth.” (p. 304) Throughout the book runs a counter theme — frightening, deadly, and always present — “the diseases of the disconnected parts.” (p. 286) Symp­ toms are everywhere: consumerism, strip mining, “progress,” the Pentagon, “sexual capitalism” (ownership and exploitation), divorce, television, tech­ nology, et cetera. Berry trembles at human behavior. We share his fears. Ecological justice is always done, though...