A Place on Earth

A Place on Earth
320 pages
© 1983 Wendell Berry

"I ain't saying I don't believe there's a Heaven. I surely hope there is. That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain't easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I've got to admit I'd rather go to Port William."  

Remember thou part but dust, and to dust thou shalt return. Between a great war and a terrible flood, A Place on Earth is a hauntingly sad look on the true cost of war to human communities, and a perfectly appropriate book to read on an occasion like Ash Wednesday. A novel of the Port William membership, in A Place on Earth Berry follows the experiences of several men as the war festers and life goes on around it.  Mat Feltner takes the lead, as his soul is tormented by the challenge of coping with his son Virgil's disappearance and presumed death on an island far from his people. He is not alone;  he has the companionship of his card-playing buddies, and one has experience the same loss as himself. Ultimately, however, the only way to address the pain is to live with it for a while, to let it sink in. A Place on Earth is more than any book in the series so far a reflection on death.

Although the war claims the sons of Port William in other books (Mat Feltner's son Virgil is the husband lost in Hannah Coulter), Death is a more active character here. As the war ends a great flood sweeps the area, taking with it young lives and sending more families into distress, and another character Jayber begins to be groomed as the village gravedigger. His working himself into the role, and constantly thinking on the life and death of the town, develop throughout the book.  Although the hope of the largely Christian west is that death is restored by life eternal in the Hereafter,  A Place on Earth's title hints to the conviction of the townsfolk, religious though they may be, that heavenly pie in an ethereal sky isn't up to taste. What matters most to them is the connection they have with each other, now, in the course of living their lives. Their sons and daughters are not just personalities to be around, they are people whose lives are depended on as the town goes on, day by day.  Even given the predominant theme of death and meaning, there's a little levity to be found here; the retiring gravedigger provides a lot of comic relief as he, in the full knowledge that he is aged and allowed to be eccentric and a little mean, lampoons the preacher who is trying to put him out to pasture before his time. Seeing the preacher struggle to dig a grave that promptly floods, he inquires: is this a burial at sea?   A Place on Earth, like Jayber Crow, is beautifully written yet sad, a story of making peace.

Home Economics

Home Economics
© 1987 Wendell Berry
192 pages

The term economics originally referred to household management, and to Wendell Berry, that's what it should remain still. Home Economics collects essays on the meaning and relation of economy to human life. In it, he deplores the cancerous growth of massive, unwieldy structures like agribusiness, globalization, and the state which destroy culture, communities, and the land, reducing the human experience to economic inputs. He ruminates thoughtfully on the value of more traditional ways of life, and advocates for an approach which is much more finely-grained For Berry, the humane society is one built to a small scale, built on local economies wherein people, not institutions, are the primary actors, and where the relationships between people and the land are respectfully maintained.

Berry is a fascinating author. At first glance, he's manifestly romantic and old fashioned, advocating for the same kind of agrarian  Republic of citizen-farmers that Thomas Jefferson yearned for. Though he's grounded in the past, quoting freely from classical poets and the Bible life, he's not mired by it: he does not despise cities as Jefferson and other agrarians did, and writes that if we wish to preserve the wilderness and farms, we must preserve our cities, too.  Though he doesn't outline his reasoning, it may be similar to that of David Owen's, who sees energy-efficient cities as the best hope for combating climate change. It's certainly a better  hope than car-dependent suburbia, which Berry despises (however much a gentle and aging scholar-farmer can despise something).   Berry urges readers to consider a return to localism not just because it's better for the environment (his veneration for which is religiously inspired), and not just because the new institutions are oppressive and destructive but because Nature has a way of correcting the unsustainable. That which cannot sustain itself will not: eventually it will fail. We will not persist living as we do now forever: our choice is in how and when we change.  In the hereafter, Berry writes, we may ask forgiveness for the crimes Nature has judged us for, but God has never shown any inclination to overturn her just sentences.

At times a warning, the vision of Home Economics is not dire.  In elaborating on the weaknesses of industrialized and globalized modernity,  he affirms that the ongoing desecration of human life and the planet will not long endure -- and in articulating what was lost, he makes clear to modern readers what it is they miss without being able to describe; the bonds of family and community life, attachment to place, and the sense of a life of meaning and purpose. His holistic vision offers to restore those powers laid waste in getting and spending.

Related:
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin. Salatin advocates some of the same ideas, at least in terms of farm ecology. He's more cheerfully manic and provocative, though.
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey (on the virtues of the wilderness)

Hannah Coulter

Hannah Coulter
© 2005 Wendell Berry
190 pages

This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and is now like a dream dreamed. [...] This is my story, my giving of thanks.  p. 5

Hannah Coulter is a coming of age story, the tale of a young woman who becomes a widow twice over, raising children through wars and hardship, strengthened by her family and extended community of Port William. Like Jayber Crow, it is less a story that is told in a straight line, and more an experience which is shared by the reader, a tale that meanders with purpose. The novel is a collection of stories and reflections, knit together by the life of Hannah into a literary quilt, one beautiful to behold and comforting to snuggle under. The prevailing themes are of love and loss,  family, enduring faith (not limited to religious, but faith in life and in one another), and communion -- communion with one another, with the land, and Providence.

Agrarianism is the backbone of Hannah and her kindred's lives: it establishes the cycles of life, provides a means of self-reliance, and offers the "joy of achievement, the thrill of creative effort".  The manifest importance of the land makes itself known even in the way characters orient themselves: they do not live on this road or that, but  take their directions from topography. Families live in this hollow, or on on those hills, or off that branch of the river: the people who inhabit Port William know the land as intimately as any deer or hawk. To them, their world is not limited to narrow strips running alongside lanes, a grid that people occupy as dots. The land and place of Port William are whole, connected, and rambling. But the lives of the city are not linked just by physical presence; they're tied together too by their common experiences. Hannah and her second husband both lose loved ones in World War 2, and that shared loss is the impetus of their relationship. When they settle in, they join an informal 'membership' of neighbors, who despite occupying separate farms, work together as one, helping to mend one another's fences, or gather in the harvest.  They do for one another whatever "needs doin'", and receive in the same spirit.

As said, this intensely thoughtful work combines stories and reflections.  The stories are sometimes tragic, other times uproarious, often charming, and always demanding --  Berry's stories have a way of hovering off the page and floating right in front of a reader's eyes and mind, impossible to ignore. Closing the book does not help. Although the reflections tend toward the melancholy -- Hannah begins her life losing one parent, promptly loses her first husband, and will see her children be scattered to the wind by ambition  -- the work is, as she says, a story of giving thanks, even in the midst of trouble. This is her abiding faith -- "rejoice always".  For though the years are not kind to Port William, as its way of life is paved over by asphalt and "developed" and the sons and daughters of the community are brought low in war or move away to make better lives for themselves in different places -- lives that prove to be not as good as they thought --  the book ends in hope.

I continue to be astonished by the beauty of Wendell Berry's prose

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

p. 57

Jayber Crow

Jayber Crow: the Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber of the Port William Membership, As Written by Himself
© 2000
363 pages

"Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told."

Jayber Crow is many things. It is one of the most agonizingly beautiful and moving novels I have ever read. It's a lyrical testament to the power of love,  the richness of community, and the pleasures of a life lived close to the rhythms  of nature.  And it's also the story of a man named Jonah, called Jayber, who once thought he had the call to preach, but left the seminary to practice barbering to live out the questions that the seminary had no answers for. It is the story of a man twice orphaned, who went on a journey, a pilgrimage, and found himself. It is a work of art.

I should acknowledge from the start that I am biased to like -- to adore -- this book, for the author's narrative voice is the kind I like best; gentle, wise, and slyly witful. I was unable to simply read the book; it had to be read aloud. Slowly. Multiple times.  The text is swollen with sentences that, like fruit hanging from a tree, demand to be plucked and savoured; they have body, being something beyond ordinary words.  Jayber Crow isn't an action drama with a clearly defined Conflict, Rising Action, Climax, and Conclusion; it's a coming of age story, in which the gracefully maturing subjects are both Jayber and his adopted home of Port William.  Jayber is a child of the Great Depression, and arrives in town shortly before the outbreak of World War 2.  That war and those that follow  will hurt his fair city, but the pain of them brings his characters to life all the more. It is a deeply reflective novel, in which Jayber will begin to wax poetic about one topic or another -- the decline of ecologically-savvy family farms and the advent of debt-based agribusiness, or the damage automobiles do to one's sense of place -- for a spell before returning to telling the story of Port William as it attempts to survive the 20th century like a little skiff tossed in a turbulent ocean.

For a long time then I seemed to live by a slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to all the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life. And when it was complete, or nearly so, it was shapely and beautiful in the light of day. It endured through the nights, but sometimes it only barely did. It would be tattered and set awry by things that fell or blew or fled or flew. Many of the strands would be broken.  Those I would spin and weave again in the morning. 

p. 330

I think the only words that do Jayber Crow justice are the words of the author himself, so plea  peruse some of the quotations for this book listed at GoodReads or even Tumblr. One selection which I posted on facebook:

One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, [he said] "They ought to round up every one of them [war protesters] and put them right in front of the communists, and then whoever killed who, it would all be to the good."
There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try and top it. I thought of Athey's reply to Hiram Hench.
It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said "'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.'"
Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. "Where did you get that crap?"
I said, "Jesus Christ."
And Troy said, "Oh".
It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

If I could only ever read one novel for the rest of my life, Jayber Crow would be it. The idea that it has only been in existence for thirteen years is staggering. It seems ageless.