Wendell Berry

Photo by Dan Carraco, Via Poetry Foundation

Wendell Berry has died at age 92. I notice the different headlines, each giving a different descriptive phrase about who he was and failing, for he was a great complex being. We are better for having had him, and he will be greatly missed. Three quotes, from among the hundreds I have appreciated:

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. … 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. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”…

…”Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

And of course, The Peace of Wild Things

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Fly free, Wendell Berry