WENDELL BERRY, THE ICONOCLASTIC NOVELIST and poet of agrarian America who spent decades composing romanticizing odes to the beauty of place and rural life, died on August 31 in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at 92.
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who → spend → 92
Berry devoted his life almost equally to both pondering America’s landscapes and farming them.
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Berry → devote → them
He was raised on his family’s farm in Henry County, the same county in which he died.
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he → raise → which
At the University of Kentucky, he cut his intellectual teeth reading Thoreau, the anti-industrialist Southern Agrarians of the 1930s, and Romantic poets like Wordsworth.
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he → cut → Wordsworth
After graduating in 1956, his talent as a writer took him far away from the Bluegrass.
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talent → graduate → Bluegrass
He spent stints in California as a graduate student, then in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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He → spend → Fellowship
His debut novel, Nathan Coulter, published in 1960, was the first of a long series of interconnected stories he set in the fictional Port William, Kentucky, modeled on his hometown.1
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he → publish → hometown.1
Two years later, in his late twenties, Berry became an English professor at New York University, but the allure of his native rural Kentuckiana—as residents of the Kentucky and Indiana border region call it—remained strong.
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residents → become → it
Rejecting his NYU colleagues’ efforts to persuade him stay, he returned to Kentucky in 1964 to teach writing at his alma mater.
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he → reject → mater
“Home—the place, the countryside—was still there, still pretty much as I left it, and there was not a reason in the world I could not go back to it if I wanted to,” Berry wrote in an autobiographical essay, “A Native Hill,” published four years later.
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Berry → leave → essay
During the late 1960s and into the ’70s, his writing turned more and more toward the issues of the day, with his most famous and widely read works growing from his observations of America amid the tumult of the Vietnam War, rapid rural industrialization, and the civil rights movement.
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writing → turn → War
Among his pacifist speeches and poems was “Against the War in Vietnam”:
Believe the automatic righteousness
of whoever holds office.
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whoever → believe → office
Believe
the officials who see without doubt
that peace is assured by war, freedom
by oppression.
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peace → believe → oppression
The truth preserved by lying
becomes a lie.
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truth → preserve → lying
]
For a white Southerner, Berry wrote with uncommon honesty about America’s history of racism, including its warping of his native culture.
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Berry → write → culture
Shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Berry—whose great-grandparents had been slaveholders—penned The Hidden Wound, a damning, memoir-like analysis of America’s race relations and atomizing social fabric.
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grandparents → pen → relations
“As a people,” he wrote, “we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the mythologizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.”
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we → write → harm
The title The Hidden Wound refers to the notion that the white slaveholders not only did terrible damage to black slaves’ bodies and minds but also, in another sense, to themselves, by institutionalizing slavery as a key part of Antebellum culture.
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slaveholders → refer → culture
This wounded legacy remained long after emancipation:
For whatever reasons, good or bad, I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I have known all along to be a wound—a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life.
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I → remain → life
If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself.
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I → think → myself
If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know.
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we → suffer → people
If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself.
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he → inflict → himself
That “wound is in me,” Berry acknowledged, “as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves.”
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Berry → acknowledge → blood
The enduring effects of racism and the degradation of America’s national spirit, Berry came to believe, demanded reckoning with the damage done to its social fabric and the environmental quality of rural life.
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Berry → endure → life
IN HIS BREAKTHROUGH BOOK, The Unsettling of America, published in 1977, Berry lamented the emergence of industrial farming and the rapid disappearance of the small farmer in modern America and the disintegration of the economy and culture that made that Jeffersonian dream possible.
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dream → publish → economy
“Today the most numerous heirs of the farmers of Lexington and Concord are the little groups scattered all over the country whose names begin with ‘Save’: Save our Land, Save our Valley, Save our Mountains, Save our Streams, Save our Farmland,” Berry argued.
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Berry → scatter → Farmland
Berry increasingly expressed his belief that small farmers were best positioned to steward the land sustainably, as long as they (as he wrote in the essay “Nature as Measure”) were living “in conversation” with the land.
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he → express → land
He pursued that ideal himself with his wife, Tanya, tilling his farmland with horse-drawn plows and living off what the earth provided.
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earth → pursue → what
“I like to eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily in good soil, not the products of the huge, bechemicaled factory-fields,” he wrote in The Pleasure of Eating in 1989.
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he → like → 1989
GIVEN HIS VIEWS, he defied easy political categorization.
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Late in life, Berry, who had long been embraced by the political left as a sort of an environmental progressive, marveled at the way he came to be appreciated by conservatives as embodying a kind of rugged, rural, “place”-appreciating spirit.
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he → embrace → spirit
Berry was also admired by both progressives and certain conservatives for his critique of competition, a central tenet of American capitalism and culture.
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Berry → admire → capitalism
In his 1988 essay “Economy and Pleasure,” Berry lamented the effects of competition on the human soul:
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Berry → lament → soul
The ideal of competition always implies, and in fact requires, that any community must be divided into a class of winners and a class of losers.
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community → imply → losers
The losers simply accumulate in human dumps.
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losers → accumulate → dumps
The idea that the displaced and dispossessed “should seek retraining and get into another line of work” is, of course, utterly cynical.
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displaced → displace → course
There is no limit to the damage and the suffering implicit in this willingness that losers should exist as a normal economic cost. . . .
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losers → be → cost
The danger of the ideal of competition is that it neither proposes nor implies any limits.
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it → propose → limits
It proposes simply to lower costs at any cost, and to raise profits at any cost.
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It does not hesitate at the destruction of the life of a family or the life of a community.
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It → hesitate → community
…and 16 more, not listed.
