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BiographyAwake at NightCompromise, Hell! (an excerpt)The SilenceAre You Alright? (an excerpt)The Morning’s NewsFor the Rebuilding of a HouseThe Supplanting

Selected Works

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky,

and is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Among his novels

(set in the fictional community of Port William Kentucky) are Nathan Coulter (1960), A Place on Earth (1967), and The

Memory of Old Jack (1974); short story collections include The Wild Birds (1986), Remembering (1988), Fidelity (1993), and Watch With

Me (1994); collections of essays include, among many others, A Continuous Harmony (1972), The Unsettling of America (1977), Recollected Essays (1981), and

Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community (1993); and among his many volumes of poetry are A Part (1980), The Wheel (1982), Collected Poems (1985) and Entries (1984).

Wendell Berry

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Late in the night I paythe unrest loweto the life that has never livedand cannot live now.What the world could beis my good dreamand my agony when, dreaming itI lie awake and turnand look into the dark.I think of a luxuryin the sturdiness and graceof necessary things, notin frivolity. That would healthe earth, and heal men.But the end, too, is partof the pattern, the lastlabor of the heart:to learn to lie still,on with the earthagain, and let the world go.

Night

WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY— I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians—be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we

neglect or destroy the economic landscapes—the farms and ranches and working forests—and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don’t uphold the health of the land and the people and the people’s work.

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Hell!

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What must a man do to be at home in the world?There must be times when he is here

as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven shadowsof the grass and the flighty darknesses

of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyondthe sense of weariness of engines and of his own heart,

his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with himas though his bones fade beyond thought

into the shadows that grow out of the groundso that the furrow he opens in the earth opens

in his bones, and he hears the silenceof the tongues of the dead tribesman buried here

a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise upbefore him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind

rain! What songs he will hear!

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Are You

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Flora was inclined to be amused at the way Elton and I imagined the worst.

She did not imagine the worst. She just dealt with mortality as it happened.

I picked up a flashlight as I went out the door, but it was not much needed.

The moon was big, bright enough to put out most of the stars. I walked

out to the mailbox and made myself comfortable, leaning against it. Elton and I had obliged ourselves to worry

about the Rowanberrys, but I was glad all the same for the excuse to be

out. The night was still, the country all silvery with moonlight, inlaid

with bottomless shadows, and the air shimmered with the trilling of peepers

from every stream and pond margin for miles, one full-throated sound filling

the ears so that it seemed impossible that you could hear anything else.Are You

And yet I heard Elton’s pickup while it was still a long way off, and then light glowed in the air, and then I could see his headlights. He turned into the lane and stopped and

pushed the door open for me. I made room for myself among a bundle of empty feed sacks, two buckets, and a chain saw.

“Fine night,” he said. He had lit a cigarette, and the cab was fragrant with smoke.

“It couldn’t be better, could it?”

“Well, the moon could be just a little brighter, and it could be a teensy bit warmer.”

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To moralize the state, they drag out a manand bind his hands, and darken his eyeswith a black rag to be free of the light in them,and tie him to a post, and kill him.And I am sickened by complicity in my race.To kill in hot savagery like a beastis understandable. It is forgivable and curable.But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath,that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.The serpent is gentle, compared to man.It is man, the inventor of cold violence,death as waste, who has made himself lonelyamong the creatures, and set himself aside,so that he cannot work in the sun with hope,or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.The morning’s news drives sleep out of the headat night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyesopen to the dark. Weary, we lie awakein the agony of the old giving birth to the newwithout assurance that the new will be better.I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,they are so open to the world.

The Morning’s NewsI look at my sloping fields not turninggreen with the young grass of April. What must I doto go free? I think I must put ona deathlier knowledge, and prepare to dierather than enter into the design of man’s hate.I will purge my mind of the airy claimsof church and state. I will serve the earthand not pretend my life could better serve.Another morning comes with its strange cure.The earth is news. Though the river floodsand the spring is cold, my heart goes on,faithful to a mystery in a cloud,and the summer’s garden continues its descentthrough me, toward the ground.

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The Morning’s News

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To know the inhabiting reasonsof trees and streams, old men

who shed their liveson the world like leaves,

I watch them go.And I go. I build

the place of my leaving.The days arc into vision

like fish leaping, their shiningcaught in the stream.

I watch them goin homage and sorrow.

I build the place of my dream.I build the place of my leaving

that the dark may come clean.

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The SupplantingWhere the road came, no longer bearing men,but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodilsrose in spring among the wild vines to be domesticand to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tanglewith white bloom. For a while in the years of its wildernessa wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor therein the cold nights. And then I came, and set fireto the remnants of house and shed, and let timehurry in the flame. I fired it so that allwould burn, and watched the blaze settle on the wastelike a shawl. I knew those old ones departedthen, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in mesomething that would not bear my name—something that bears usthrough the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

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Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992

Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957–1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987

Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005

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This book was created by Alyssa Celentano in Spring 2013 for Washington University in St. Louis’ Typography II class in St. Louis, Missouri. It is printed on 64 lb Strathmore charcoal paper. It uses black and white found photography and the typefaces Helvetica and Baskerville MT.