Some remarks by Wendell Berry to a gathering of students and faculty members at Indiana University:
• “The art of living is primary, art-making is secondary.”
• “William Carlos Williams said, ‘Only the imagination is real.’ What he meant, I think, is that imagination enables us to see the world. Imagination is not the power to invent, but to apprehend reality.”
• “When we’re talking about making and doing, as in farming or carpentry, we’re always talking about art.”
• “We need to recover a taste and a respect for hard physical work, which all your education has taught you to despise.”
• Explaining why he gave up a position at NYU to return to Kentucky: “Even when I thought I was going to be a university bum [that is, a career academic], I realized the only material I had was the country and people I’d come from.”
• “As a young man, I wanted all the credit for my writing; as an old man, I realize how little credit I deserved. I owe immense debts to others.”
• “Faulkner is a danger for a young writer, because his faults are so much more imitable than his virtues.”
• He praised Wallace Stegner, who “not only committed himself to write about his region, but also to its protection, by bringing it into the imagination.”
• “I’ve been opposed to the coal companies on the grounds of land ruination for 45 years.”
• “There are great pleasures in stubbornness” (grinning). “If you have a taste for contention, as I do, you have to make sure that the battles do not take you over. Edward Abbey said, ‘Saving the world is a good hobby. If you make it a profession, you’re sunk.’”
• “I’ve always harbored a certain antipathy to schools.”
• On attending a military high school (where his parents sent him, against his will, because he was causing so much trouble at home): “It was a good place to learn about resistance, and to learn about mechanized authority.”
• “Our relationship to history is neither objective nor subjective, but participatory, personal.”
• “I’ve always been a livestock man, which means I get to spend at least a part of every day, when I’m home, outdoors.”
• “There’s a very strong storytelling impulse in my family. I listened to my grandparents, who spoke in a way uninfluenced by the mass media.”
• “Our problems are very great, but they require many small, local solutions.”
• “The problem we call ‘climate change’ is really the result of waste and greed. The government will not address it, least of all the so-called Tea Party. We’ve got to start with ourselves, by curbing that waste and greed.”
• “Somewhere at the heart of our problems is the need for being present—to one another, to our places, to the land. I make a principle of avoiding screens—computers, televisions, and the like. The job is to be entirely present, and it’s a good job.”
• “The question is, can you accept your life as it is being lived, where you are?”
• “I spent all last summer thinking about butterflies—this abundant beauty—and such thought is lifesaving.”
• “I’ve always felt uncomfortable if I didn’t have a book somewhere in reach.”