LIFE

'We live the given life, and not the planned.'
Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.178.

HOPELESS? HOPEFUL PRAYER

His prayers lean upward
on the dark and fall
like flares from a catastrophe.
He is a man breathing the fear
of hopeless prayer, prayed
in hope.

Wendell Berry, from '1994 VI' in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.181. 

KNOW YOUR FAMILY TREE

'Andy could not have understood his father until he had understood his grandfather.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.110.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO COME HOME

'What was his homecoming like for Andy? It was like being naked and cold and then getting into his clothes.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.106.

TRUE MEMBERSHIP

'They followed the only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help. By extension of their one rule, there was no "settling up." All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody's need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.106.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE

'...he had misplaced himself...'
Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.103.

THE SUFFERINGS THAT COME FROM FRIENDSHIP

'Jim Stedman then felt in his heart one of the hardest of human sufferings: the wish to help his friend more than he knew he could.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, p.25.

TRUE FREEDOM

'Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.129.

HUMAN WHOLENESS

'Men are whole not only insofar as they make common cause with each other, but also insofar as they make common cause with their native earth, which is to say with creation as a whole, which is to say with the creator.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.104.

THE POWER OF FANTASY

'My childhood was surrounded by a communal daydreaming, the richest sort of imaginative talk, that began this way - in work, in the misery of work, to make the work bearable and even pleasant. Such talk ranged all the way from a kind of sensuous realism to utter fantasy, but because the bounds of possibility were almost always ignored I would say that the impetus was always that of fantasy. I have heard crowds of men, weary and hungry and hot near the end of a day's work, construct long elaborate conversations on the subject of what would be good to eat and drink, dwelling at length and with subtlety on the taste and the hotness or the coldness of various dishes and beverages, and on combinations of dishes and beverages, the menu lengthening far beyond the capacity of any living stomach. I knew one man who every year got himself through the ordeal of the tobacco harvest by elaborating from one day to the next the fantasy of an epical picnic and celebration which was always to occur except, richly, marvelously, in the minds of his listeners.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.44.

INSTINCTIVE RECOGNITION OF BEAUTY

'He did not say to himself that it was beautiful. He felt, he recognized, the beauty of it in his flesh...'
Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen more stories of the Port William Membership, p.27.

HOW SEXUAL LIBERATION HAS FAILED TO LIBERATE

'According to its claims, sexual liberation ought logically to have brought in a time of "naturalness," ease, and candor between men and women. It has, on the contrary, filled the country with sexual self-consciousness, uncertainty, and fear.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.141.

PRACTICING LOVE WHEN WE DON'T FEEL IT

'The proper question, perhaps, is not why we have so much divorce, but why we are so unforgiving. The answer, perhaps, is that, though we still recognize the feeling of love, we have forgotten how to practice love when we don't feel it.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.140.

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

'...marriage, family life, friendship, neighborhood, and other personal connections do not depend exclusively or even primarily on justice - though, of course, they all must try for it. They depend also on trust, patience, respect, mutual help, forgiveness - in other words, the practice of love, as opposed to the mere feeling of love.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.139.

THE INDUSTRIALSATION OF SEX

'The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community. But the fall of community revels how precious and how necessary community is. For when community falls, so must fall all the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature and the lives of wild creatures. All of these things have been damaged by the rule of industrialism, but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and the most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life. Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals. It brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.133.

CHOOSING COMMUNITY OVER TECHNOLOGY

'To this day, if you say you would be willing to forbid, restrict, or reduce the use of technological devices in order to protect the community - or to protect the good health of nature on which the community depends - you will be called a Luddite, and it will not be a compliment. To say that the community is more important than machines is certainly Christian and certainly democratic, but it is also Luddism and therefore not to be tolerated.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.131.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU DESTROY

'If you destroy the ideal of the "gentle man" and remove from men all expectations of courtesy and consideration towards women and children, you have prepare the way for an epidemic of rape and abuse. If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between these two people but as a bond between these two people and their forbears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.125.

HAPPINES

'He has begun to think of happiness as a power of mind, to be cultivated like thought and imagination. Because he has come to the age when he must think of such things, he recalls the times when he has been happy against reason, and for no reason. He recalls the times when has been happy for reasons so small and ephemeral that nobody has learned to charge for them: a bright-colored tiny bird feeding in the top of the tallest sycamore, a bird's song, a wild flower, a butterfly, a briar heavy with ripe berries, the sound of a beloved voice, the touches of loved ones. To miss or refuse the happiness of such free, small, beautiful, and passing things would be dangerous, he thinks. It would dishonour life itself, Heaven itself. It would be ingratitude.' 

Wendell Berry, 'The Order of Loving Care' in The Art of Loading Brush, p.216. 

THE BEST FARMERS...AND PASTORS?

'The best farmers have been ceaselessly occupied with the question, never fully or finally answered, of how the various creatures and things of their living are to be fitted together to their mutual advantage.'  

Wendell Berry, 'The Order of Loving Care' in The Art of Loading Brush, p.212. 

NATURE, DIVERSITY & FULLNESS

'Nature appears to wish and to require that the life of any of her places should be abundant as possible and as diverse as possible in its kinds. Every creature desires and attempts to live fully, and for this it is dependent on the lives of other creatures. And this fullness depends in turn upon a formal interdependence somewhat but not entirely comprehensible by humans. The Law of Diversity, mysterious as it ultimately is, is justified by the Law of Fullness.' 

Wendell Berry, 'The Order of Loving Care' in The Art of Loading Brush, p.183.