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What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry, 1969-2017
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a writer whose life's work has been dedicated to "what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households." In essays both deeply personal and powerfully polemical, Berry speaks for a culture of stewardship and husbandry, for the welfare of rural people often forgotten and marginalized, and for the vital role of sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Berry's writing combines the authority and wisdom of experience—he has lived on and farmed a hilly acreage in Henry County, Kentucky, on sustainable principles for more than half a century—with the grace and clarity of a great American prose stylist.
In this two-volume edition, such landmark books as The Unsettling of America and Life Is a Miracle are included in full, along with generous selections from more than a dozen other volumes, revealing as never before the evolution of Berry's thoughts and concerns as a farmer, neighbor, citizen, teacher, activist, and ecological philosopher. Throughout he demonstrates that our existence is always connected to the land, and that even in a modern global economy local farming is essential to the flourishing of our culture, to healthy living and stable communities, and indeed to the continuing survival of the human species. Berry's essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.
In this two-volume edition, such landmark books as The Unsettling of America and Life Is a Miracle are included in full, along with generous selections from more than a dozen other volumes, revealing as never before the evolution of Berry's thoughts and concerns as a farmer, neighbor, citizen, teacher, activist, and ecological philosopher. Throughout he demonstrates that our existence is always connected to the land, and that even in a modern global economy local farming is essential to the flourishing of our culture, to healthy living and stable communities, and indeed to the continuing survival of the human species. Berry's essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.
1702 pages, Hardcover
Published May 21, 2019
27 people are currently reading
552 people want to read
About the author
Wendell Berry
292 books4,863 followersWendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 20, 2020
First of all, you have to read both volumes before posting a review? I was pretty proud to make my way through Volume One. Here are my thoughts on it:
Wendell Berry is one of the finest essayists in all of American literature. His prose is gorgeous—supple, richly observed, closely reasoned. But like all of us, he tends to come back to the same themes and insights, and these don't improve with repetition. The impact of ten essays somehow feels less than that of one or two.
Berry is at his best when he is observing nature and other people. His pieces on black and Amish farmers, and on his work on his own farm, for instance, are beautiful. His more polemical essays—on teaching literature, on the role of the university, on why he won't buy a computer, and the like—are more tendentious and cranky.
I'm left thinking that he'd have been better served by a more selective sampling of his work.
June 2020
So now I’ve made my way through Volume 2. In it, Berry is even more curmudgeonly, and more impressive. It occurred to me as I read these pieces that this is what a true conservative sounds like. And that’s something very different from the sort of neoliberal defender of corporate greed and global exploitation that now gets called a conservative. Berry is committed to a defense of the individual person as part of a local community and natural landscape. His ongoing interest in a healthy soil as a complex ecosystem that can take decades or centuries to evolve, and requires constaint nurturance to be sustained, is thus richly indicative of his mind and temperament. His is the conservatism of the parent, the farmer, the husband, the good steward.
Wendell Berry is one of the finest essayists in all of American literature. His prose is gorgeous—supple, richly observed, closely reasoned. But like all of us, he tends to come back to the same themes and insights, and these don't improve with repetition. The impact of ten essays somehow feels less than that of one or two.
Berry is at his best when he is observing nature and other people. His pieces on black and Amish farmers, and on his work on his own farm, for instance, are beautiful. His more polemical essays—on teaching literature, on the role of the university, on why he won't buy a computer, and the like—are more tendentious and cranky.
I'm left thinking that he'd have been better served by a more selective sampling of his work.
June 2020
So now I’ve made my way through Volume 2. In it, Berry is even more curmudgeonly, and more impressive. It occurred to me as I read these pieces that this is what a true conservative sounds like. And that’s something very different from the sort of neoliberal defender of corporate greed and global exploitation that now gets called a conservative. Berry is committed to a defense of the individual person as part of a local community and natural landscape. His ongoing interest in a healthy soil as a complex ecosystem that can take decades or centuries to evolve, and requires constaint nurturance to be sustained, is thus richly indicative of his mind and temperament. His is the conservatism of the parent, the farmer, the husband, the good steward.
July 4, 2019
Everyday life seems to be growing ever busier and more intrusive. Modern technology has eroded our privacy and its deluge of data-streams distracts and overwhelms us with a lot of useless, even harmful “information.” As but one of many consequences, most of us have lost the precious gift of solitude without which it is very difficult to step back, calm down, take stock, and truly think.
This loss manifests itself in many ways: flaring tempers, impatience, difficulty in focusing, and in non-consideration of others. No wonder so many of us often feel worn out, frazzled, hassled, and done in!
Real thinking, after all, requires two processes – observation and reflection – which require both time and focus. To observe is to look attentively, to see all of what is before us and not just the surface or periphery of things. We do this when we ponder a compelling piece of statuary or admire a beautiful painting or walk slowly through a lovely garden, carefully noting the varied colors, size, and placement of its many flowers and trees.
To reflect is to seek a deeper understanding of what we have witnessed or experienced by linking it to our chords of memory and assessing it through our ethical values. By this process we can consider whether the words, behavior, or things that we have observed are good, worthwhile, useful, and beautiful or whether, on the contrary, our more careful consideration reveals them to be harmful and ugly.
Without regular use of both observation and reflection we are in danger of losing our moral way. Like all skills, training one’s self to think takes time and practice. It also helps to become acquainted with individuals who possess this ability already.
Wendell Berry has spent most of his life in his native state of Kentucky, where he farms and writes. Because of his love of the land he is an avid environmentalist and an outspoken critic of how Americans have repeatedly mistreated the land and its creatures. In musing over a humble cabin in the wilderness that he has labored to rebuild, he writes:
"…my mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation. I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into the earth like leaves in the autumn.
"In this awakening there has been a good deal of pain. When I lived in other places I looked on their evils with the curious eye of a traveler; I was not responsible for them; it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long, and I did not feel that I would stay. But here, now that I am both native and citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved in history. What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forefathers were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it; the lives of most of them diminished it, and limited its possibilities, and narrowed its future. And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.
I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or their own community in it. I am forced, against all my hopes and inclinations, to regard the history of my people here as the progress of the doom of what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households.
"And so here, in the place I love more than any other and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place."
He links today’s people with their distant ancestors in ways that remind us how it is possible that there are times when the sins of the fathers are continued into distant generations:
"It occurs to me that it is no longer possible to imagine how this country looked in the beginning, before the white people drove their plows into it. It is not possible to know what was the shape of the land here in this hollow when it was first cleared. Too much of it is gone, loosened by the plows and washed away by the rain. I am walking the route of the departure of the virgin soil of the hill. I am not looking at the same land the firstcomers saw. The original surface of the hill is as extinct as the passenger pigeon. The pristine America that the first white man saw is a lost continent, sunk like Atlantis in the sea. The thought of what was here once and is gone forever will not leave me as long as I live. It is as though I walk knee-deep in its absence.
"The slopes along the hollow steepen still more, and I go in under the trees, I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed….
"It was fine dirt that lay here once, and I am far from being able to say that I could have resisted the temptation to plow it. My understanding of what is best for it is the tragic understanding of hindsight, the awareness that I have been taught what was here to be lost by the loss of it.
"We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity – our own capacity for life – that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
"We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to co-operate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."
Through practice, we also can learn to see deeply, to better understand, and to more fully cherish the wondrous miracle of this beautiful planet and of all who share it with us. But if we continue along our current unthinking path, we will lose everything and our children will inherit a wasteland.
This loss manifests itself in many ways: flaring tempers, impatience, difficulty in focusing, and in non-consideration of others. No wonder so many of us often feel worn out, frazzled, hassled, and done in!
Real thinking, after all, requires two processes – observation and reflection – which require both time and focus. To observe is to look attentively, to see all of what is before us and not just the surface or periphery of things. We do this when we ponder a compelling piece of statuary or admire a beautiful painting or walk slowly through a lovely garden, carefully noting the varied colors, size, and placement of its many flowers and trees.
To reflect is to seek a deeper understanding of what we have witnessed or experienced by linking it to our chords of memory and assessing it through our ethical values. By this process we can consider whether the words, behavior, or things that we have observed are good, worthwhile, useful, and beautiful or whether, on the contrary, our more careful consideration reveals them to be harmful and ugly.
Without regular use of both observation and reflection we are in danger of losing our moral way. Like all skills, training one’s self to think takes time and practice. It also helps to become acquainted with individuals who possess this ability already.
Wendell Berry has spent most of his life in his native state of Kentucky, where he farms and writes. Because of his love of the land he is an avid environmentalist and an outspoken critic of how Americans have repeatedly mistreated the land and its creatures. In musing over a humble cabin in the wilderness that he has labored to rebuild, he writes:
"…my mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation. I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into the earth like leaves in the autumn.
"In this awakening there has been a good deal of pain. When I lived in other places I looked on their evils with the curious eye of a traveler; I was not responsible for them; it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long, and I did not feel that I would stay. But here, now that I am both native and citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved in history. What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forefathers were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it; the lives of most of them diminished it, and limited its possibilities, and narrowed its future. And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.
I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or their own community in it. I am forced, against all my hopes and inclinations, to regard the history of my people here as the progress of the doom of what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households.
"And so here, in the place I love more than any other and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place."
He links today’s people with their distant ancestors in ways that remind us how it is possible that there are times when the sins of the fathers are continued into distant generations:
"It occurs to me that it is no longer possible to imagine how this country looked in the beginning, before the white people drove their plows into it. It is not possible to know what was the shape of the land here in this hollow when it was first cleared. Too much of it is gone, loosened by the plows and washed away by the rain. I am walking the route of the departure of the virgin soil of the hill. I am not looking at the same land the firstcomers saw. The original surface of the hill is as extinct as the passenger pigeon. The pristine America that the first white man saw is a lost continent, sunk like Atlantis in the sea. The thought of what was here once and is gone forever will not leave me as long as I live. It is as though I walk knee-deep in its absence.
"The slopes along the hollow steepen still more, and I go in under the trees, I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed….
"It was fine dirt that lay here once, and I am far from being able to say that I could have resisted the temptation to plow it. My understanding of what is best for it is the tragic understanding of hindsight, the awareness that I have been taught what was here to be lost by the loss of it.
"We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity – our own capacity for life – that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
"We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to co-operate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."
Through practice, we also can learn to see deeply, to better understand, and to more fully cherish the wondrous miracle of this beautiful planet and of all who share it with us. But if we continue along our current unthinking path, we will lose everything and our children will inherit a wasteland.
November 29, 2022
Just about every word this man writes remains required reading, even when much of it is repeating what he has said before countless times.
February 6, 2024
Excellent!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews