Thursday, August 11, 2022

Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age | The New Yorker

…Berry's admirers call him an Isaiah-like prophet. Michael Pollan and Alice Waters say that he changed their lives with five words: "Eating is an agricultural act." Pollan became a scourge of the meat industry, genetically modified food, and factory farms; Waters launched the farm-to-table movement. The cultural critic bell hooks, another Kentuckian, began reading Berry in college, finding his work "fundamentally radical and eclectic." Decades later, she visited him at his farm to talk about the importance of home and community and the complexities of America's racial divide.

Berry's critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. In "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," an infamous 1987 essay that ran in Harper's, he announced, "I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work." When indignant readers sent a blizzard of letters to the editor, Berry noted in reply that one man, who called him "a fool" and "doubly a fool," had "fortunately misspelled my name, leaving me a speck of hope that I am not the 'Wendell Barry' he was talking about." (continues)
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LISTEN: Daily Bread (W/Michael Toms, 1985)...  Natural Gifts (W/Michael Toms, 1992)... Farmer, ecologist, and writer Berry provides some rich and fertile ground for recreating life and culture. He speaks of enduring values, the wholeness of life and the interdependence of all creatures, especially humankind. Berry's self-discipline, ethical sense and human compassion come through as he leads us from the microcosm of his Kentucky hill farm to the macrocosm of a sane and reasoned planetary vision based on personal integrity, faithfulness, and love... Using words like “affection” and “satisfaction,” “care” and “joy,” Berry calls for a re-evaluation of the basic values and practices of our lives. He illustrates his ideas with glimpses of his own life and those of his Kentucky farm neighbors, and describes a future where we can learn to find love, wisdom and meaning in the people, the places and the work of our own daily lives. “Abstractions don't work-abstractions are abstractions,” he says. “You have to realize that finally you must do something.”
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Wendell Berry on Delight as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism, the Key to Mirth Under Hardship, and the Measure of a Rich Life, BY MARIA POPOVA

“The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom… is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.” (continues)

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