The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this new gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of Agrarian philosophy. Mr. Berry believes that American cultural problems are nearly always aligned with their agricultural problems, and recent events have shone a terrible spotlight on the divides between our urban and rural citizens. Our communities are as endangered as our landscapes. There is, as Berry outlines, still much work to do, and our daily lives—in hope and affection—must triumph over despair.

Mr. Berry moves deftly between the real and the imagined. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays and stories, including "The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age," which explores Agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World" is added here as the bookend of this developing New Agrarianism. Four stories from an as-yet-unfinished novel, better described as "an essay in imagination," extend the Port William story as it follows Andy Catlett throughout his life to this present moment. Andy works alongside his grandson in "The Art of Loading Brush," one of the most moving and tender stories of the entire Port William cycle. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Nature, Agriculture, Economics, Short Stories

270 pages, Hardcover

Published October 31, 2017

About the author

Wendell 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."

Reviews

[Lori Keeton · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a challenge this year I was to choose a book of essays to read and thought that this would be the perfect time to delve into the writings of one of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry. Berry writes fiction which centers around his created membership of Port William, Kentucky and has introduced some of the most down-to-earth and loving characters I’ve met on the page. You see, Berry’s passion is his love for the land and his views in these essays regarding the importance of agrarian living are impressive. He knows what he is talking about and has lived the benefits of an agrarian life. He has seen the highs and the lows. Nowadays, he sadly writes about the downfall of this lifestyle and provides his insights into how in the world this has happened. Reading Berry’s views and insights has given his fictional characters a realistic place and way of life. He writes from a completely authentic place and has created beloved characters that I now see are grounded in his beliefs.

In the preface, agrarianism is defined

Agrarianism’s natural home is the field, the garden, the stable, the prairie, the forest, the tribe, or the village…and the cottage rather than the castle. So it is little wonder that most contemporary Americans are strangers to the term, concept, and the geography.

In this collection of essays, Berry presents three long essays and four short stories, again taking his readers to Port William through the character of Andy Catlett, the member who is most like himself. Berry is a man of compassion and commitment. It shows in his writings just how valuable he believes in agrarian communities. He finds value in keeping the focus on the local communities who provide so much to so many and his intention was for these writings to become a public conversation. The ache and the sadness for the loss of this lifestyle is what stands out to me most. Did I mention that he is also an activist and advocate? And he is still writing today at age 88 which really makes my heart happy!

I absolutely loved reading his short story, The Art of Loading Brush. Poor Andy Catlett is getting on in life and the members that depended on each other for neighborly care, helping each other out on each other’s farms, have passed on. He needs a new fence and hates to ask his son to help even though he’d stop everything to do it. Andy decides to hire the work out, and let’s just say that no one else can ever do as good a job at a task that you can do it and no one is going to do it the way you would. This is what Andy, sadly, experienced. It’s a gentle story about doing things properly, orderly, and with care. It’s one of Berry’s best short stories.

Here is Berry speaking about his own small farming community in Kentucky:

For many young people whose vocation once would have been farming, farming is no longer possible. You have to be too rich to farm before you can afford a farm in my county.

As long as the diverse economy of our small farms lasted, our communities were filled with people who needed one another and knew that they did. They needed one another’s help in their work, and from that they needed one another’s companionship… When that work disappears, when parents leave farm and household for town jobs, when the upbringing of the young is left largely to the schools, then the children, like their parents, live as individuals, particles, loved perhaps but not needed for any usefulness they may have or any help they might give. As the local influences weaken, the outside influences grow stronger…

The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carry out meals. Meanwhile, in a country everywhere distressed and taxed by homelessness, once-used good farm buildings, built by local thrift and skill, rot to the ground. Good houses, that once sheltered respectable lives, stare out through sashless windows or have disappeared.

It’s so sad to me to think that Berry has lived the good and productive farming economy in his lifetime and now one that puts no value in its worth. He speaks from his heart and his experience. I am so very glad to have read this collection and look forward to reading even more.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read and loved much of Berry's fiction over the years, but this was my first foray into his essays. However, there are four Port William short stories and a poem included in this book, so when it was offered at $1.99 on Kindle, I couldn't turn it down. The essays are thought provoking to say the least, and includes his thoughts on politics (he hates politicians of either stripe, feels that they don't care at all for the people they "serve", but are a necessary evil to be guarded against. No surprise there). He dislikes global movements and causes, for instance, piling everything under the heading of climate change as an example, and explains that all change starts at a local level. And he admits that Andy Catlett is like him in his thoughts and actions and life span, but with a different life trajectory for his fiction.

I don't know that I will undertake more of his essays, they felt a little "preachy" and I prefer to get my understanding through his fiction. The third and fourth stories and the long poem are worth the price of the book and more, taking me into present day Port William with the aging Andy. The essays made me think, the fiction left me with a sense of peace.

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one thing about Wendell Berry’s writing is that you’re never surprised. You’re never surprised by the content. He has the same thing to say over and over again. But the thing is that it is so contrary to commonplace thought that you need to be reminded again and again of its sense. Who knew that common sense and commonplace thought would one day be at odds. This is Berry’s enduring lament. You’re never surprised by the quality. While Berry always says the same thing over and over again, it’s wholesome and delightful that you can’t help but enjoy listening to it again.

“The Art of Loading Brush: New Agraian Writings” is an updated synopsis on where Berry stands. It is a pleasing mixture of polemical essays against scientific industrialism and Port Williams anecdotes. It also includes a fun hybrid wherein Andy Catlett (fictional Port William member) meets the likes of real people such as Wes Jackson and Gene Logsdon.

[Andrew Blok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry's collection of essays, fiction and poetry from 2017 defines agrarianism against other ways of relating people to land: industrialism, consumerism, etc. And, like Berry's other essays, this book (and my out of this world writing) allows me to write the most boring one-sentence recap of a book that is engaging, enlightening and an emotional reading experience. While the workings of small farm programs, Medieval English poets and the art of loading a wagon with brush don't jump from this page as fascinating or important subjects, they do jump from Berry's. In fact, in one story, a character makes the case for making loading brush a required course in college.

Berry reveals the small (he'd likely take issue with this word here) and steady acts to be the foundational acts of a society. He connects our disregard for the small, local focus on farming, community and economy to the deterioration of the huge sections of America dubbed "rural America." The collection is always insightful, not always hopeful and good for a reminder and renewal of a caring commitment to the places we are, a satisfaction with enough and a critical evaluation of the mantra of bigger, better, faster and more.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book certainly deserves five stars but my lack of agricultural context made it a bit challenging to fully engage in certain portions. Berry is a masterful writer of titanic ethos and formidable logic. This latest offering from him comprised of essay, short story, and poetry, makes me long to move to a farm and lean hard into discovering the simple joy of living with intentional kindness towards a particular place and receiving the same in return. Providentially, that's just what I'm going to do.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely transformative narrative on the state of our Agrarian past present and possible future. Divine writing quality makes this one of the best books I've read in years.

[John Caulfield]

I bought this book for the handful of stories of Port William membership. I only skimmed through agrarian essays.

The chapter titled “A Branch Way of Doing” perfectly encapsulates one of the themes I most adore in Berry’s writing: the gift of frugality and the contented blessedness that flows from knowing the difference between making a killing and making enough.

The chapter primarily focuses on the offspring (Danny Branch) of my favorite Port William character, Burley Coulter. Dedicated Berry fans will enjoy the additional tidbits regarding Burley’s personal life that seem to be lacking throughout the other novels.

[Jeff Zell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berry blesses us with a mixture of essays, fiction, and a poem. All are on the theme of the agrarian life. Agrarian life consists of loving and caring for earth and all its inhabitants. Agrarianism as Berry articulates it is about using the land in a way that preserves it for future use. Berry creatively and consistently contrasts the ruination of industrial farming and livestock raising with agrarian principles. Industrial principles include bigness, efficiency, chemical usage, short term goals and profit. Agrarian principles emphasize imitating the cycles of Nature, husbandry, preservation, thrift, observing the details of the farm, and subsistence.

The chapter “The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation” traces the understanding of “Nature” in English literature from Alan of Lille to Spencer, Chaucer, to current usage. Berry then uses the long held understanding of nature to contrast with our current understanding of nature in literature and economic policy.

The fiction focuses on the character of Andy Catlett. Andy is the fictional representative of Wendell Berry. Berry has Andy meeting many of Berry’s real friends, such as David Kline and Wes Jackson, and then discusses what he learned from them.

Berry does not break any new ground here. The themes of this book are consistent with Berry’s previous work. However, as I was reading, I got the feeling that these writings are a summation. They are the reflections of a man who is well aware that his time of work will come to an end soon. The fictional “Andy” is doing a lot of remembering of people (family and friends) and the wisdom that they imparted to him. “Andy” is clearly preparing to join his ancestors soon.

Engaging the writings of Berry leads the reader to evaluate our place and participation in our modern life. Berry reminds us through his essays, fiction, and poetry that they way things are now is not how it has always been. Berry lays side by side the industrial way of life and the Agrarian way of life. As Berry describes it Agrarianism is about a proper ordering of priorities in relationships, economics, the good life, and about loving God and the fullness of what consists of our neighbors.

[Russell Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry's personal and critical essays remain, even at this late stage of his life, beautiful, challenging, and thought-provoking reading. Many people are fans of Berry for his poetry or his fiction; I am not, though I often wish I was. It might have been the case that this book could and introduced me to both, containing as it not only typically powerful essays by the man, but also fictional writings and long, concluding poem. But unfortunately, once again that was not the case; I found the longest work of fiction in this collection, "The Order of Loving Care," which Berry himself admits is kind of an odd experiment in fictionalized autobiography, sweet but quaint, and the others didn't move either (the "The Art of Loading Brush," the final fictional piece in the book and obviously the one which gave the collection its name, had some real bite). But this doesn't matter, because all these pieces follow three wonderful, powerful, and in one case even surprising essays. "Thoughts of Limits in a Prodigal Age" lays out Berry's vision of agrarianism, with the concept of "parity" playing a central role, and introducing a powerful condemnation of the very idea of the "inevitability" of technological progress and thus environmental destruction. "Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend" reveals, once again, Berry at his most cranky, as he, while never disputing the facts behind the panic over climate change, reveals himself as one who finds those claims being made by erstwhile allies of his s mostly accepting the same sense of technological inevitability which makes climate change a threat in the first place. And finally, my favorite (and the longest) of the bunch, "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation," in which Berry artfully weaves together poetry, Christian theology, environmental science, and the history of writing about agriculture, to give a portrait of a "Mother Nature" that I, at least, think is worth believing in. All of these essays are great, and worth the price of the book alone.

[Patti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be a challenging, exciting and delightful book to read. I love reading a book that causes me to stop and think and re-read what I've just read. I was delighted with two connections that Berry described in the book. I've read many of his other books, but somehow I missed his strong connection and friendship with Wes Jackson of The Land Institute. Both men are fighting creatively and as hard as they can for the same thing in very different ways.

The other delight was learning about The Berry Farming Program in which Sterling College students from Craftsbury, Vermont will come to study in the fall of 2018 in Henry County and "work with renowned agrarian leaders, including businesses, farm and food organizations, and local farmers. In contrast to the dominant industrial approach to agricultural education, The Berry Farming Program is drawing tangible connections between education, communities, and the land." Sterling College is a unique program that has been fighting to teach and maintain the agrarian way of life and is focused on rural place-based ecology and farming. Another unique exciting connection!

[J.F. Ethan Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Wendell Berry has proven himself a master wordsmith, although no further proof be needed. Reading this book, one can tell that Mr. Berry has spent his life savoring words, taking the time to carefully choose each one. His care for words is apparent, not only for clarity and cohesiveness, but also because of his love for words. One can tell that Mr. Berry is a lover of words, that he loves how a sentence or line sounds when spoken together, and he makes a great effort to write beautifully, not just well.

As always, I recommend this collection of Mr. Berry's work to everyone, as I recommend all his works I've read thus far. If you find Mr. Berry's words challenging, and perhaps abrasive, to your modern, comfortable life, read on. If you find his works interesting, yet perhaps overly romanticized, read on. If you are enamoured and thirsting for more of his words, keep reading. Or, if you're like me, finding yourself both delighted and relieved that there is someone else in the world who thinks like yourself, though has obviously been doing it for much longer, read until your heart is close to bursting, and then read some more.

[Jonathan Hines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry may be getting older but his pen remains as sharp--and relevant--as ever in this fine collection of essays, fiction, and poetry. Those who know his work well will find the familiar threads--agrarian life, local economy, and the moral depravity of industrialization. Those who perhaps are encountering Berry for this first time may be challenged by his admonishment of a modern worldview that ignores the interdependency of man and nature. Either way, one can't help walking away from the work of Kentucky's finest writer after an honest reading without feeling the pull of the ancients.

[Don Heiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry published his book of moral essays, poetry and stories about agrarian values in 2017. The year before (in 2016) he received from President Barack Obama the National Humanities Medal. "The Art of Loading Brush" helped me understand the values of my grandparents and parents whose combined lives spanned 116 years from 1888 to 2004. This book I will long remember and it's precepts will haunt and inform my daily reflections. There is no index, but his essay references and internal copy references are very helpful. (l/P)

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry, who is over 80 years old now, is a person I hold in the highest regard. He is an elder, a keeper of stories, a person who tends to his place on earth. He has done necessary and important work well. He has lived out the maxim that good work is its own reward.

As he puts it in the words of his fictional alter ego: “His work, he thinks, the love that was in it, the love that it was for, has given him a happy life.”

Yet in one of the most moving passages of the book he questions the value of his contributions.

“But what is the significance of ‘literature’ and the implied ‘literary value’ in a toxic and wasting country? Would the plays of Shakespeare compensate the loss or ruin of the topsoil of England?”

After a lifetime of advocacy for what he calls agrarianism Berry is grappling with defeat. No matter how convincing, how total, how powerful his criticism of industrial agriculture has been over the years, America has only sprinted further down the road of ruin and waste. That he still finds his work worthwhile and rewarding, in light of this rejection, speaks to the strength of his convictions.

In the Art of Loading Brush, published in 2017, Berry is still doing his work. The book contains three main essays and several shorter works of fiction. There is also a poem at the end.

The book covers so much ground and I have taken so many notes that it’s difficult to attempt a succinct review of it. But this is such a necessary book that I feel compelled to have a go at it. While Berry is certainly revisiting ideas he has discussed before, his writing is fresh and vital. He offers new insights and perspectives into the issues he has been pondering for a lifetime.

One of the most pressing things for me, and also for Berry, is understanding where this civilization went wrong. Why would any community of people destroy the place they’re living in? For Berry, the disintegration of human integrity has led to the disintegration of the land.

“But before their [his own peoples] failure was economic, it had been cultural. They had destroyed so much, partly no doubt in ignorance, but mostly for want of a cultural imperative to save it.”

Speaking of America Berry observes: “Our country was ‘settled’ largely by escapees, people leaving behind a past or a place in some manner used up, heading off for a ‘new’ place where the future was expected to be brighter. As a people, we have escaped to the West from the East, from the country to the city, from the city to the suburbs, from the suburbs back to the country or back to the city. And because we have never known well enough, or worked well enough, where we were, this has almost always been a movement from old damage to new destruction, and always with the aim of ‘a better future for our children’.”

I believe, as does Berry, that we’d be better off if we focused on making the present more live-able for everyone. This is good and necessary work, and it must be motivated by human affection.

“Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear. Good work is done by knowing how and by love. Love requires faith, courage, patience, and steadiness, none of which can come from fear.”

Agrarianism, then, is the practice of doing good work with loving care.

“I think that agrarianism had, and where it survives it still has, a sort of summary existence as a feeling - an instinct, an excitement, a passion, a tenderness - for the living earth and its creatures.”

It is most of all an art: “And the arts, all of them, are limited. Apart from limits they cannot exist. The making of any good work of art depends, first, upon limits of purpose and attention, and then upon limits specific to the kind of art and its means.”

That is to say, agrarianism recognizes human limits, and puts our tasks in human sized terms.

"Agrarianism proposes an economy of local resources, exchanges, and services that are cheap or free, depending on the virtues of good work and thrift, tending toward the maximum of local self-sufficiency and independence. Such an economy is not like, and can never be made like, the industrial economy that proposes dependence upon expensive products, extravagant wants, excessive consumption, limitless spending, and waste."

After decades of globalization such an agrarian economy is clearly not likely to reappear overnight, if at all.

Still, Berry sees hope in the reaction of some doctors to our toxic landscape: “They [health professionals] see that the idea of a healthy individual in an unhealthy community in an unhealthy place is an absurdity that, by the standards of industry, can only become more absurd.”

While Berry is unlikely to live to see it, I believe his hope is well placed. This is exactly the bothersome thought that led me to his work. My interest in health led me to food and from there to the ground. Healing ourselves, our families, our culture, our communities, our land, is work that desperately needs to be done. It is good work worthy of a lifetime, and I hope that many generations of young people will follow Berry’s example.

The most unforgiving judge of a person’s life is one who looks back at it with the benefit of hindsight. While Berry has done his life work in relative obscurity, it is a treasure that will be valued, and will continue to enrich and sustain, long after the industrial agriculturalists are in the ground.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this collection containing essays, short fiction, and a poem, Berry continues the arguments of his Agrarian philosophy he began in The Unsettling of America 40 years ago. Berry's wife may be right about him repeating himself but he always does it with profound thoughtfulness and grand eloquence.

[Emma Troyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wendell Berry has a big crush on the Amish.

I loved this book, particularly The Order of Loving Care, wherein I deeply identified with Andy Catlett's feeling of being involved in a lifelong conversation of agrarian activism and at times wondering what it is all for, since the number of his allies are so small as to be unnoticeable in the world of power and policies. Andy concludes that the love with which he has approached his work, and the friends it has led him to, have made it more than worth the effort, and I agree. Reading books like this one also remind me of this, that it is not a sign to give up being what you are simply because it feels like you, and maybe ten others, are the only ones.

(And I do find it a little funny how glowing Mr. Berry is whenever he talks about the Amish.)

[Mark Fulk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wendell Berry for me is a paradox. On the one hand, his agrarianism is eminently sensible and vivid, and something that I for the most part agree with. On the other hand, he is far too critical of the liberal left when his real venom should be directed at the right (at least the Clintons and the Obamas have a potential to be talked around and reasoned with). His worldview is also very heteronormative, although he does not seem to have any homophobia. I think he needs to think a bit more about why people (like myself) have been driven from the country and small-town American life and would not choose to return to it.

His fiction, included here, and his poetry (one poem) included here is interesting and unique. There is little or no dialogue in his fiction, which seems an interesting technique. I intend to query in my courses whether or not this constitutes fiction formally (and I want to read some of his novels now). His essays, especially the long one reading nature as a symbol in the thought of poets from Alan of Lisle forward is worthy of time and further thought from scholars and others alike.

[Ryan Spear · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first foray into Berry’s essay-writing and it was helpful to have Port William in mind as I was able to “map” his agrarian philosophy onto the imaginative landscape. While a bit prone to sound like an erudite rant at times, the book’s split between essays and a few short stories of some of the Port Williams folks gives a glimmer of hope to an otherwise despairing assessment not just of the state of farming but of a whole philosophy of life (culture, as he would put it).

I’ll continue to mend fences with Berry through reading more of his work.

[Stephen Devoto · Rating 3 out of 5]

He makes one very serious, very excellent point, namely that we should farm in full communion with our land, not in exploitation of it. Along they way there are interesting tales of farmers, writers, scientists, and agrarian cultures. And a lot of literary analysis of English writing about "Nature".

It is somewhat repetitive, with a bit too much literary analysis for me.

[Charity Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've loved Wendell Berry for years, and in this book, he's sharper and clearer on what the good life is than in any other work. It's a combination of essay, fiction, and poetry; a great primer on Berry's life of writing.

[Kim Pollack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I finish reading something from Wendell Berry, his words and ideas tumble inside my head for weeks afterward. What a gift he is to us and how much the world needs to listen to what he says.
This is a man who has lived longer than most of us and has seen the devastating changes that have taken place in his community and in rural America over the decades since industrial farming became the norm. He has seen land abused and soil eroded and degraded. He has witnessed generations of farmers go from being able to make ends meet with help from their strong, caring communities to farmland and farming equipment becoming so expensive that hardly any young people can afford to purchase a farm.Wendell Berry is a farmer so he understands farming and has many farming friends and family members.
In The Art of Loading Brush, he advocates returning to a slower pace of living, smaller family-run, biodiverse farms, and farming with an attitude of just enough instead of the "Get Big or Get Out" way of doing things that became popular since the 1970s. He looks at the Amish communities as examples for rural communities that have broken down. He says one question the Amish ask whenever they consider a change is, "What will this do to my community?" Rural America's failure to ask this simple question has been to the whole country's detriment.
Another important theme in Berry's essays, letters, and fiction is having a strong local, food secure economy. What sense does it actually make for agricultural communities to grow crops or raise livestock and then sell them to some far off place so that the people in their own communities have to truck in food from far off places? He says that puts us in a very dangerous place should the supply chain break down. And we've seen this happen around the country during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic! The more I read his words, the more I wonder where our common sense has gone to.
Instead of taking to the streets, Wendell encourages us to actually make the changes that we want to protest about in our own lives and homes and with our own families. Take care of the earth. Cut out waste--be thrifty and frugal. Love and connect with our neighbors. Slow down and think before we act! (And I recommend reading The Art of Loading Brush and all of Wendell Berry's other books!!!)

[Scott Sanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a major summing-up of Wendell Berry's cultural and agricultural vision, written with his usual force and grace. The essays and stories are suffused with an elegiac sense of the skills, knowledge, topsoil, biological riches, communal values, and human possibilities that we are squandering or destroying in our consumption-driven industrial economy. Published in Mr. Berry's eighty-third year, the book reflects an awareness of his aging body, along with a youthful desire to pass on wisdom from the agrarian lineage to which he belongs. The values he espouses, though ancient, are of vital importance to our own time: hard work, neighborliness, thrift, humility, loyalty to place, skillful provision of food and shelter, and reverence for the creation, all seasoned with a country sense of humor. You will find these values expressed throughout his many books of poetry, fiction, and essays, but nowhere more forcefully conveyed than in The Art of Loading Brush. If, in this time of unraveling, you are looking for a healing vision, then read this book.

[Casey Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Wendell Berry, this book is excellent. I had read several of his books of essays in the past, but this one, being recent, applies the same thought to more current events. The first half of the book is comprised of two fairly long essays dealing with the way we interact with nature and the economy. The second half of the book seems to be more of a reflection on his life and what he's learned through the lens of his fictional character, Andy Catlett. This book is perhaps less direct and more wandering that some of the other books if his that I've read. I very much enjoyed it, but if you're looking to get a more comprehensive idea of what he's all about, I would recommend "The Art of the Commonplace" which selects essays from a range of his other publications. You could also go with "the unsettling of America" or another of his collections that build a more specific argument over the course of the book.

[James Prothero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Berry is a great writer, but this isn't his best. He keeps edging close to a manifesto and then backing off it again. He lives the question thoroughly begged: how is that "Agrarian" philosophy of his going to apply to anyone but small sustenance farmers? Should we all abandon the industrial and digital revolutions and head back to the farm? If not, what is Berry on about? Perhaps for him it is a spiritually more honest thing to do and I appreciate that may well be true for others as well as him? What about the rest of us? I am also a Romantic, and the appeal to "go back to the land" is strong with me. But how does it work in with this current world? Tcchnology is a pandora's box and we've long since opened it. Can we stuff the contents back and close it again? Berry leaves these questions unanswered.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Berry writes relentlessly about particularity and locality in the broadest, least informative way possible. The best sections are about specific farmers and ecologists he has known and admires, who have worked particular plots of land or investigated specific practices, such as farming with trees or replacing standard wheat fields with perennial grains. This book needs more on that and less on the wicked, greedy, mean industrialists who want nothing but to rape and pillage the countryside, filling the streams with toxins and the air with poison.

[Wrdwrrior · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Wendell Berry! He is a thoughtful, poignant writer of agrarian topics, but he also advocates home as a place where your soul and heart reside, not just your body. His writings have always inspired me, and I hope he continues to advocate for "old fashioned" values like community, good work and friendship.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing. I do not exaggerate when I say it is by far one of the greatest works I've read, and should be required reading for everyone. Simply brilliant, full of wisdom and moments to make you laugh, cry, and be happy to be alive. Anyone who cares about the land, about Nature, about good work, should stop what they are doing, go out, and buy this book.

[Linda Gaines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry is wonderful. His description of farming life decades ago reminds me of my life on a poultry farm as a young person. It is sad that growing food has become so different in these times and I'm afraid we can never go back. We can live our own lives more simply and glory in creation.

[Brad Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good book, but one that left me with a deep sense of melancholy and longing for an agrarian ideal, which may or may not have ever existed, but is certainly now beyond my grasp.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is obvious that this effort of thinking has to confront everywhere the limits both of nature and of human nature, limits imposed by the ecosphere and ecosystems, limits of human intelligence, human cultures, and the capacities of human persons. Such thought is authenticated by its compatibility with limits, its willingness to accept limits and to limit itself. This will not be easy in a time overridden by fantasies of limitlessness. A market limitlessly usable by sellers and limitlessly exploitable by buyers is merely normal in such a time. And limitlessness is the common denominator of the dominant political sides, both of which tend to refer to limitlessness as 'freedom.'" -p.53 (The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age)

"The good care of land and people, on the contrary, depends primarily upon arts, ways of making and doing. One cannot be, above all, a good neighbor without such ways. And the arts, all of them, are limited. Apart from limits they cannot exist. The making of any good work of art depends, first, upon limits of purpose and attention, and then upon limits specific to the kind of art and its means." -p.54 (The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age)

"Native to our character and condition as it may be, experience teaches us not to rely on hope, and there is always the considerable danger that we will hope for the wrong things." -p.59 (Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend)

"By withdrawing our false, speculative, wishful, and fearful claims upon the future, we would significantly and properly reduce the circumstance or context within which we live and think. This would place us within our right definition, our right limits, as earthly creatures and human beings. It is only within those limits that we can thing practically, usefully, and so with hope, of our history, of what we have been and who we are, of our sustaining connections and relationships." -p.69 (Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend)

[Edwin Muir: "the great ascendency of science has brought a superstitious reverence for authority, the authority of those who are in secret." -p.75]

"Our time's great wrongs of waste and pollution are wrong in themselves. The would be wrong whether or not they cause climate change. They are wrong according to the economic measure of thrift. They are wrong according to the measure of the sanctity of the living world, and because of their immediate practical harms to nature and to human nature. Their first damage is to the character of the perpetrators." -p.75 (Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend)

"I think we have to see that Science has become conglomerated into an allegorical figure, a giant or a god, who supposedly looks all around like a great owl from its highest perch, seeing 'objectively' everything involved. But of course it does no such thing, and it never has. If we stand outside the sanctuary where its believers have gathered to offer it their trust, we see that this Science is a much smaller figure, merely human, humanly capable of being wrong, of directing its efforts toward the most money and the highest bidder, of 'proving' and approving the new against the old. Its great enterprise of discovering and proving facts has freely involved or allowed the division and isolation of facts. Not fact need confront a competing fact. No fact of technological innovation need ever associate with the facts of community or ecological life." -p.93 (Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend)

"The Christianity of Merton and the Shakers is hardly the only religion that counsels us to 'take no thought for the morrow.' This is because thinking of the future is an escape. And despite our frantic claims upon Christianity as our more or less national religion, we are an escapist society. Our country was 'settled' largely by escapees, people leaving behind a past or a place in some manner used up, heading off for a 'new' place where the future was expected to be brighter. As a people, we have escaped to the West from the East, from the country to the city, from the city to the suburbs, from the suburbs back to the country or back to the city. And because we have never know well enough, or worked well enough, where we were, this has almost always been a movement from old damage to new destruction, and always with the aim of 'a better future for our children.'" -p.100 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"[I]t confirmed my belief that, among people still interested in the qualities of things, intuition still maintains its place and its standing as a way to know.
Intuition tells us, and has told us maybe as long as we have been human, that the nature of the world is a great being, the one being in which all other beings, living and non-living, are joined. And for a long time, in our tradition, we have called this being 'Natura' or 'Kind' or 'Nature.'" -p.114 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"But once we acknowledge, once we permit our language to acknowledge, the immense miracle of the existence of this living world, in place of nothing, then we confront again that world and our existence in it, forever more mysterious than known. And ten the air swarms with questions that are scientific, artistic, religious, and all of them insistently economic. Some of the questions are answerable, some are not. The summary questions are: What are our responsibilities? and What must we do? The connection of all questions to the human economy is finally no escapable. For our economy (how we live) cannot leave the world or any of its parts alone, as the ideal of the wilderness preserve seems to hope. We have only one choice: We must either care properly for all of it or continue our lethal damage to all of it." -p.117 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"We have our lives by no right of our own, but instead by the privilege of sharing in the life that sustains all creature." -p.128 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"Moreover, expertise which is credentialed and much dependent on the demeanor and language of authority is typically unable to acknowledge either its inner ignorance or the immense mystery that surrounds equally the asker and the answerer. And so askers are in effect left alone with the expert answer on their singular small places within the mostly uninformative universe." -p.148 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"Just so, an honest poet who is making a poem is doing neither more nor less than making a poem, undistracted by the thought even that it will be read. Poets, or some poets, bear witness as faithfully as possible to what they have experienced or observed, suffered or enjoyed, and this inevitably is instructive to anybody able to be instructed. But the instruction is secondary. It must be embodied in the work." p.150 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"The Wheel of Life, or the fertility cycle, is not an instance of stability as opposed to change, as Spenser may have hoped, but rather an instance, much more interesting and wonderful, of stability dependent upon change." -p.165 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"I have heard Wes say many times that 'the boundaries of causation always exceed the boundaries of consideration.' The more I have thought about that statement, the more interesting it has become. The key word is 'always.' Mystery, the unknown, our ignorance, always will be with us, to be dealt with. The farther we extend the radius of knowledge, the larger becomes the circumference of mystery. There is, in other words, a boundary that may move somewhat, but can never be removed, between what we know and what we don't, between our human minds and the mind of Nature or the mind of God. To ignore or defy that division, wishing to be as gods, believing that the human mind is so capacious as to contain the whole universe and its whole truth, is characteristic of a kind of science that is at once romantic and industrial, ever is search of new worlds to conquer. From its work, I fear, we can expect only a continuing spillover of violence, to the world and ourselves." -p.171 (The Presence of Nature in the Natural World)

"To be satisfied with little is difficult. To be satisfied with much is impossible." -p.193 (The Order of Loving Care)

"Nature appears to wish and to require that the life of any of her places should be as abundant as possible and as diverse as possible in its kinds. Every creature desires and attempts to live fully, and for this it is dependent on the lives of other creatures. And this fullness depends in turn upon a formal interdependence somewhat but not entirely comprehensible by humans. The Law of Diversity, mysterious as it ultimately is, is justified by the Law of Fullness." -p.210 (The Order of Loving Care)

"He has begun to think of happiness as a power of the mind, to be cultivated like thought and imagination. Because he has come to the age when he must think such things, he recalls the times when he has been happy against reason, and for no reason. He recalls the times when he has been happy for reasons so small and ephemeral that nobody has learned to charge for them: a bright-colored tiny bird feeding in the top of the tallest sycamore, a bird's song, a wild flower, a butterfly, a briar heavy with ripe berries, the sound of a beloved voice, the touches of loved ones. To miss or refuse the happiness of such free, small, beautiful, and passing things would be dangerous, he thinks. It would dishonor life itself, Heaven itself. It would be ingratitude." p.216 (The Order of Loving Care)