World Ark Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 16) Interview by Lauren Wilcox Wendell Berry PORT ROYAL, KY.— To get to the writer Wendell Berry’s farm in Kentucky, it is necessary to leave the interstate for a diminishing series of state highways and country roads. As the roads become smaller they become slower. The fields seem to shrink into large gardens; the trees grow taller and broader; buildings grow older and closer to the road, until the road is a shady street fronted with wood-frame houses. The houses have porches; old men on the porches raise a hand at passing cars. Back where the interstate meets the smaller roads, there is a sign listing things one must not drive onto the interstate, including “Farm Implements” and “Animals on Foot.” It is as if the sign marks not only the intersection of two roads but the intersection of two worlds, and cautions one against trying to merge with the other. Much of Berry’s poetry, essays and fiction is concerned with this divide: between city and country, product and source, joy and grief, one person and the world. Berry is perhaps best known as a champion of agrarianism. He has empathy and a deep affection for small farmers, whose livelihood he has watched decline precipitously in his lifetime; his novels celebrate their work and mourn its slow erosion. But he is not a romanticist. His agrarian essays are intellectual and often maverick analyses that touch on every part of our lives: environment, culture, spirituality, government, relationships. Mostly, I think, his writing is about relationships. He is concerned with sustainable and productive interactions, whether between two people or a people and their land. Any functional relationship will deal with the bad as well as the good, will include waste and death just as it includes birth and growth. This is the natural order of things, and it works as a system of checks and balances, to keep the cycle of life progressing at a sustainable pace, without more waste than we can handle. A road that prohibits “Animals on Foot,” in other words, is a road on which traffic is moving too fast. Wendell Berry knows this, but he also feels it. The way he renders the world in his poetry and his novels is not altogether happy and not altogether sad but a vivid, unnameable combination of both, the way it feels to love something, to be fully committed to something, that is all the time growing and changing and vanishing. That work, says Berry, is the work of living. PHOTO BY GUY MENDES On the Natural Order of Things 16 January/February 2008 | WORLD ARK www.heifer.org http://www.heifer.org
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