Takeaway line from Wendell Berry's Paideia Prize acceptance speech on education

"I think our education system is too big to fail, but I also think it's too big to fix--without a lot less money."

My introduction to Wendell Berry at the Paideia Prize banquet last night

Greetings.

I have been to almost every CiRCE conference. I think I may have missed two. And what I have found over the years is that there is one author who is referred to by participants more than any other, and that is Wendell Berry. If you don’t know of him before you get here, you are sent home thinking that something is missing in your life and that you probably ought to do something about it.

He is here with us tonight. I had heard that Wendell gets a lot of invitations to speak. And I think I asked him one time how he decided which ones to accept. As I recall, he said something like, “The easiest thing is to just say “No.” And I understand that he employs that option liberally. And so I first want to thank him on behalf of the CiRCE Institute for accepting our invitation—and our award.

Secondly, I want to say why it is that I appreciate Wendell Berry. I met Wendell before I had ever read any of his books. He had come to teach a class at Highlands Latin School. I had heard that his books were pretty good. And soon I fell to reading his novels. It was a bit like going through the wardrobe and entering another world.

The world I entered was a world of life, and death, and joy, and sorrow, and peace, and far-off war, and laughter, and weeping, and charity, and violence; it was a world of work, and play, and friendship, and love. There was something striking about this world, and for a long time I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then one day I realized what it was: It was not another world that I had entered. The world that I had entered was this world.

All roads lead to Port William.

I told my wife one time that Wendell Berry’s stories were the one thing I read for no reason whatsoever. They were the only books that I read for no other end than themselves.

His novels and short stories had the great virtue of being not just good, but true. But his essays had another quality that it took me a little while to identify. One of his collections of short stories is titled Fidelity. But any collection of his essays could easily have bourn that title. They were faithful: not only in the sense of being true, and therefore faithful to the world, but in the sense of being faithful to the Word.

There is a sense of integrity that leaps from every line. There is a word that is very seldom used, although examples are everywhere: the word "cant." It means insincere, hypocritical, platitudinous speech. I find myself falling into it on occasion. But I can’t remember ever encountering a word of cant in anything of his I have ever read.

And there’s one more thing.

I was teaching class one day, and—I don’t know how we got on the subject—but Emily, his granddaughter mentioned that on Saturday mornings, “Granddaddy takes us out and teaches us how to to horse farm.” The “us” included her brother Marshall. “And when the weather's bad,” she continued, “he takes us up to the cabin and teaches us how to write. Granddaddy’s got boxes this high with the stuff I’ve written.”

I’ve thought about those remarks from time to time, and I’ve thought about the fact that his son Den farms too, and I’ve seen a few things Mary, his daughter, has written, and how he has devoted so much time to passing on the things that he loves to his children and to his grandchildren.

“Fidelity” is not just the title of one of his books.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Wendell Berry ...

Writers Wendell Berry, Silas House at slumber party in KY Governor's office

Agrarian authors Wendell Berry and Silas House are among the protesters having a "slumber party" in the Kentucky Governor's office to protest mountaintop removal in eastern Kentucky, a deviant form of coal mining that basically destroys everything in its general vicinity, polluting

It's the energy equivalent of fishing by throwing a stick of dynamite in the water. Berry and the other protesters said they were going to stay there until they were arrested, but the authorities, realizing what a public relations disaster that would be for the Beshear administration, decided maybe they'd better just leave them alone.

This isn't the first time Berry has tried to get arrested, only to encounter uncooperative authorities. What does a guy have to do to get arrested these days?

"A Speech to the Garden Club of America," by Wendell Berry

Another sighting of one of our Modern Wise Men. I'll have to find a way to put these nine last lines in Wendell Berry's new poem, "A Speech to the Garden Club," in the New Yorker, over my garden somewhere:

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

Read the rest here.

Is the world coming around to Wendell Berry?

Harold Goddard once said: "The world is forever catching up to Shakespeare, only to fall behind him again." I don't think the modern world has yet caught up with the 73 year-old Wendell Berry, but Rod Dreher, writing in the Dallas Morning News, says he thinks it might be about to.

I told my wife the other day that Wendell Berry is the only author whose books I read for their own sake, not for anything I might glean from them to "use". They are not, in that sense, "practical," and yet, saying that, I realize they have changed my life and the way I think--and ultimately the way I do things--more than any other.

I find it increasingly remarkable how many of my conservative friends, some of whom are what my son calls "Rush babies," have been discovering Wendell Berry. What happens in their thinking about life and culture--I should perhaps rather call it an attitude--I can only describe (having gone through it myself) as akin to a Copernican revolution.

One friend told me, "I have spent the better part of my adult life studying C. S. Lewis. I'm spending the rest of it studying Wendell Berry."

Here is Dreher, writing about how Berry answers the very problems of which today's economic crisis has made us painfully aware:

Could any man be less relevant to the politics and culture of our time than an old Kentucky poet-farmer who is so out of step with the times that he refuses to use a computer and still tills his earth using draft horses? And yet, given the converging crises of this extraordinary moment in American history, it just might be that in the winter of a long and honorable career, Wendell Berry's moment has arrived.

Check out the rest of this wonderful article here.

World Magazine gets Wendell Berry wrong

Anthony Bradley at World Magazine laments that some evangelicals are planning on voting for Obama. Fair enough. The man voted against a partial birth abortion ban, which places him, in my estimation in the same category as a person who favors slavery: you just don't vote for him, no matter what else he believes.

But Bradley then makes the following statement:

So why aren’t Christians, en masse, joining the Constitution Party? It may have something to do with the fact that for most Christians, our theology really does not inform our politics. Politics and faith are two unrelated compartments for most of us, if we’re honest. This compartmentalization, in part, explains why so many evangelicals uncritically embrace the socialistic and Marxist visions of Jim Wallis, Wendell Berry, Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo, and so on.

Wendell Berry? A Marxist? C'mon guys. Bradley is obviously frustrated, but that doesn't excuse a statement like this. Berry is not a Marxist, or even a socialist. He's certainly not a member of the religious right and his views on some things are problematic, but in large part Berry propounds a vision of Christian community--and a view of the environment thoroughly based on the book of Genesis--unparalleled by any evangelical thinker.

World Magazine editors, are you listening?