I present to you, Wendell Berry, a 90-year-old poet, essayist and author who lives on a farm in Kentucky. Berry has written eight novels and 57 short stories, along with over a dozen collections of essays. As the world has progressed, Berry has happily continued writing longhand. He even wrote an essay titled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.”
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. -Wendell Berry (Excerpt from “The Peace of Wild Things”)
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Berry writes about community, love and loss. He is an eloquent activist for the proper care of our planet. In my mind, the greatest quality of his work is how it gives us a deeper and richer understanding of what it means to connect with one another.
Many of his stories are joined by their setting in the fictional American town of Port William, following characters in their interwoven stories during time periods all throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Every one of these tales is bound up with the others; the central character of any given book or short story is bound to appear in the others for a scene or two, or perhaps in a story told or memory recalled. Family names like Feltner, Keith and Coulter quickly become familiar to anyone who reads these stories.
The community between these characters is the soul of Port William. Everybody knows everybody and they exist separate from the rest of the world, in a way. Maybe that sounds familiar. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to write a piece about Goshen College. However, being here in this small corner of the world, I see so much around me that is reminiscent of the Port William Membership, and that brings me a lot of joy.
Part of the beauty of Berry’s writing is that, for the most part, it lacks harsh judgment. He doesn’t carry himself in a remotely pretentious way. In fact, he would likely object to me using him as an example at all. As he says in a witty notice at the beginning of “Jayber Crow,” a novel he published in 2000: “Persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct or otherwise ‘understand’ it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.”
I’ll just have to temporarily accept my place on the island of explainers for the sake of this article.
So the question then is, why is it important to read Berry’s work? I think that it reminds us of true things that we often forget about, like the real value of radical closeness to one another, whether that be literal or figurative. Berry can also show so many sides of the human experience with equal legitimacy all within the same story, from the side that wrenches at the soul to the side that is charming and downright funny.
In “Jayber Crow,” large portions of the book are centered on the heartbreak and complexity of unrequited love. Within the same story are tales of drinking too much and accidentally baking an oven completely full with a cube of cake.
The stories ring so true because that’s what life is actually like. There are hard moments and amazing moments, sometimes in the same day or same hour — and that’s beautiful.
In his stories, countless conversations pass among friends lounging around the barber shop or sitting on the edge of the river or passing each other on walks through the forest. It’s a stark contrast to the destructively fast pace of life we experience nowadays. Certainly things aren’t perfect, but there is so much to be learned and enjoyed in the pages of Berry’s work.
A quote from “Jayber Crow” that describes perfectly a way I’ve felt many times throughout my life is the line, “I don’t think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.”
To me, it feels like a breath of fresh air to sit down, open one of Berry’s books and sink peacefully into the lives of the people of Port William. I think those stories can help us realize the beauty of what we already have all around us.
