Wendell Berry

Thursday

John-Paul Heil

Wendell Berry’s homecoming

Wendell Berry, who died Monday aged 92, was a man who loved the soil and the soul. Writing from Kentucky, where his family has lived and farmed for generations, Berry built up, over more than sixty years, a corpus of fiction, non-fiction and poetry – all genres in which he distinguished himself – which, when taken as whole, reveals a profound and coherent philosophy of the earth and how it relates to human community.  Unfortunately, the average person probably doesn’t know who Berry is. Even those who have heard of him might only know his incendiary 1987 Harper’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” or his watershed 1977 takedown of maximalist agricultural practices, The Unsettling of America.

wendell berry

Wednesday

Nate Hanrahan

Why Wendell Berry mattered

Like most adults who write their thoughts down regularly, I was raised in a home by a mother who maintained piles of books strewn around the house. There were more books than anyone in our home could read combined, but you could find our favorites open on tabletops and dressers with a pencil, or another book, pinned in them to hold a page. Most of these books that were propped open were my mother’s and they included dozens of Wendell Berry’s works. I slowly absorbed a version of Berry’s way of thinking: through reading, through my mom’s infatuation with his work, through osmosis as I watched Cartoon Network next to open copies of Hannah Coulter and What are People For? Berry has begun to suffer the same literary fate as C.S.

wendell berry

Friday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

What the success of the DSA tells us

The success of the Democratic Socialists of America in the June primaries has prompted much speculation about what it means, not only for the Democratic establishment (the so-called “moderates” who are nowadays hardly that) but for US politics as a whole. The fact is that American politics as a process and a structure – the campaigns, the media coverage, the candidates’ basic strategies, the lies, the subterfuges – has barely changed. What has changed is the mentality of the winning candidates, which cannot be properly described as “political” at all in the word’s recognizable sense; it is simply a white-hot brain core of elemental rage. Rage at what, exactly, it is difficult to say, given its wildly unfocused and incoherent nature. Billionaires? MAGA?

dsa