Admittedly, I taught English in a performing arts school, so much of what we discussed adopted this strange urgency: If we can get just this single passage right, if we can write this one thing clearly, we’ll have figured out people, and then we’ll know what they ought to look like off the page and in motion—and in the mirror, I suspect. That’s the trick of an intellectual life. You have to ground it in people, but people are hard. Perhaps especially the people you love the most.

I do not doubt the re-creative force of fiction: a power, Ralph Ellison insisted, that allows all the dissonance of the world to exist in one space; it doesn’t solve anything, but the very idea of letting it exist together means we can deal with it and shape it. We desire perhaps some kind of fatalistic joy that can guarantee resolution, a namable end, a definable thing. The understanding of just what one’s entire life has meant. And maybe the tension and ambiguity lie in the dissonance between such a desire and the navigating of that desire.

I don’t know.

I’d always joke and say that if I won the lottery, I’d take them all to London in the spring. We’d see all the shows at the National, I’d say. And we’d take the tour and we’d walk along South Bank and buy books and it’d be visceral and real and somehow representative of everything we were together. I’d say this and they never laughed; instead they always got sad. Why would you tell us this, Ms. Johnson. Now it’s all we want.

Instead I’d give them a book, preferably used so that the history of readership could be tactile, and I’d tell them I hope this offers you the right lesson at the right time in the right place. That you’ll see the threads of memory as they wind all the way back to this moment, contained in an object and made real.

I’m thinking of this now that I’ve digested two FPR conferences and soon a third, conferences I attend mostly to see a former professor of mine again, now as an adult ostensibly more capable of knowing him as a person and understanding lessons long ago inherited. I’m thinking of this now as FPR grieves Wendell Berry. Because grief requires memory, but memory requires a kind of possessive knowledge often at odds with community.

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana, Dr. Peters used to lament, as Berry did, the seemingly youthful inclination toward leaving home—either to seek an education or to set down roots, as it were, far from the actual soil we were raised on. He likened it to a kind of perverse intellectualism, the kind of thing people love to boast about as a matter of intellectual superiority but which itself remains an intellectually vapid pursuit. He used to say we’d all be better off going back home to tend a small farm than continuing with what passed for liberal arts education these days (“these days” being some twenty years ago now but no less familiar).

He also said, paraphrasing from an abundance of literary genius, that people who prefer cold weather are morally superior to those who prefer warm and that the Spartans, Pistons, Lions, and Tigers are all God’s teams, so…you know…do with that what you will.

But despite my attending a family school 350 miles away from where I grew up, whose liberal arts luster had faded some from the time of my grandparents, it was still Peters who introduced me to Emerson for the first time, then later Postman and Berry, never afraid to remind us that a community does not get stronger unless we individually are willing to improve ourselves first. It was he who gave me the Romantic poets and redefined imagination, who read Keats with his feet up on the desk and told us life is precious because it is short, who read Wordsworth and told us to walk in the early mornings. It was he who took one look at my first paper and asked kindly, “Why not just get to the point” and crossed out the first two pages. And it was he who challenged the very assumptions I had about academic hypocrisy. His Bar Jester antics aside, he didn’t just preach, you see; he practiced. If he told us we might do better in this world to build with our hands and not machines, or walk to work instead of drive, it was only because he did these things himself and knew their worth. It was he who said, in homage to his own great teacher, “You don’t get to judge this book. This book judges you.” And it was he who taught us the etymological distinction between apology and its more modern turn toward shared grief.

I don’t mean to feed the ego of a man who, on the first day I ever met him, greeted the class by saying, “I just finished writing a story. It’s a good one. I’m going to read it to you now.” I mean only to say there’s a reason a fairly liberal public high school teacher from Minnesota drove 600 miles to an event in Michigan where she was likely the only person in the room voting for Tim Walz a third time, why she flew to Waco, Texas, and walked around the Dr. Pepper Museum, and why she’ll fly to Indianapolis to hear people speak on neighborly arts, certainly, but on Wendell Berry most definitely. I am an ‘itinerant vandal’ as Peters once condemned, having spent most of my life split between two states, so the travel itself wasn’t the issue, but there must have been some moment of exquisite clarity that first summer in which I realized I had too long been avoiding the act of “placing” those people who are most important to me within the context of their world and not my own.

And yet, because of my memories, the first thought I had when an Augustana friend texted me the news of Berry’s passing, was how inadequate the phrase “I’m sorry for your loss” would be for the man who gave me my first Berry essay. Such an expression denotes a shared understanding of sadness, and certainly there is some of that—I read Berry with my students, too, after all— but it would be more appropriate to say, “I apologize for your loss.” It is unique to you, shaped by your memories, abstracted and then made concrete in ways I am not privy to. I defend that possessive grief even when the man you’ve lost is so widely beloved.

My grandmother is ninety; she is my last living grandparent, and when she passes, I will be relentless in my possession, even while I know my grief is shared. My best friend has terminal colon cancer, and I know we will lose him before his children are ready. He has an entire mountain of support and a world I cannot possibly have seen all of, and still, I will grieve him possessively as though I am the only person who knows him. Not because I am but because my grief must be placed before I can honor it and before I can share it.

I never had the privilege of meeting Wendell Berry, so all I know about him has been learned through Peters, through FPR, and through Berry’s own writing. But here’s the thing: Peters wrote me a letter once when I first started teaching, reminding me that something I would do or say might one day help a student in a dark hour…so do or say it— and I keep that letter in a copy of Wendell Berry: Life and Work on a bookshelf decorated with photos of students and family. Abstract made concrete.

So, JP, I apologize for your loss. With all my heart.

But it’s basketball season now, so check your ego.

I think Wendell Berry’s prime subject was economy, the system by which we live and gain our lives and maintain other lives and that requires primary resources, hope, and effort, in order to produce yields. Our first economy, as I think Wendell envisioned things, is Nature. The great lesson of Nature is continuity. Nature’s primary economy is self-preservation. Right now the oak trees are dropping their acorns, one tree may produce thousands of acorns in the fall. Some of those acorns will become saplings and eventually some of those saplings will survive and produce a great harvest of their own acorns, and the entire cycle will hopefully continue. That is what an individual oak tree is designed to do, and the acorn of today anticipates the acorns and oaks of future generations, and comes from an ancestral oak itself. I think Wendell’s stance was to see Nature in these terms, to accept a lean year or an abundant year equally, provided that continuity remains the primary function. This is true for a small farm. But the caretaking is an immense responsibility and entails all factors, from proper care for the land and water to humane treatment of the animals we raise for our food, to proper health for the families and communities who live on small farms and apply their labor and hopes and spirits to the task.

I think Wendell’s vision was to start with an individual determined to live in the world on the terms the Creator has indicated, if we see Creation for what it is and revere it and understand ourselves as caretakers. If we take care of this holy Creation, we will meet our human purpose. We will also take care of our families and our communities. We will live in the world as a fellowship, as God’s children, members one of another. If we are to live in such a manner, we will have to understand our inheritance and account for the sins of our fathers and also pick up and maintain their virtues. This will help us live with greater accord today, and it will mean we will lay a reliable foundation for future generations. Thus the continuity we observe in a single oak tree is the kind of continuity we should wish for our human lives and our human communities.

Wendell approached these matters in practical terms. He operated his farm with continuity as the purpose. He had to improve his land, because previous caretakers had damaged it, knowingly or not. He made his own errors on the way and determined to correct them, knowing it may take a generation for a damaged pasture to heal. If you have a damaged pasture you may have to face the fact that your effort is to help it heal—and you may not live to see it fully healed and thriving. That is another virtue I find in Wendell’s work and example: we must do work in our lifetime whose benefits may not arrive until long after we are gone. By this measure, the impact of a single human life reaches beyond the physical years of that life. We are capable of living on such terms—something Wendell learned from previous generations, which is a hope he brought to everything he did and wrote.

But this gets us into the unseen. We cannot see the past we come from, nor can we see the future possibilities we are trying to preserve. Yet we cannot escape the reality of such connections. If we live with this profound connection to our past and our future, then we have to face our responsibilities, and that will probably require some imagination. We can work sloppily or recklessly. We can do things on the cheap or in belligerent haste. We can waste ourselves, our resources, our time, and our spirits. We can lay waste to others in increasingly “efficient” ways. But you don’t have to be a great scholar to realize this is no way to live. We cannot forget the past nor can we throw away the future, and that knowledge ought to influence the work we do in the present, not just the quality of the work, but its purpose, which does not boil down to mere money. Yes, we can work for ourselves and our families, but if we aspire to have meaningful lives, we have to understand we are working for each other and the home we share, for our common good and welfare. For me, that is the thread of continuity in all of Wendell’s writing, that a farmer or an artist is not singular, but is a co-creator, aligned with the holy qualities of Creation, and somehow that kind of artist is animated by a moral imagination. So the continuity we see in Nature can be the same continuity that grows in our art—no spectacle, just a steadiness, the slow pace as the mind learns from and belongs to Nature. Nature is interdependent and completely integrated. We can find our lives in it, and nowhere else. The earth and Nature are God’s Creation. So are we. Such a reality, however, is not a barrier. It is, instead, a gift.

One of the many pleasures I take from all of Wendell’s writing, regardless of the genre, is the privilege of seeing his imagination at work. Early in his novel, A World Lost, Wendell presents nine-year-old Andy Catlett, who has decided against his mother’s preferences to take a lone swim in a farm pond. Here is the scene:

I turned over on my back and floated for a long time. Looked at from so near the surface of the pond, the sky was huge, the world almost nothing at all, and I apparently absent altogether. The sky seemed a great gape of vision, without the complication of so much as an eye. Now and then a butterfly or a snake doctor or a bird would fly across and I would watch it. But what really fascinated and satisfied me were the birds high up that, after you had looked into the sky a while, just appeared or were just there: a hawk soaring maybe, or a swift or a swallow darting about.

. . . I was nine years old, going on ten; having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want to be anyplace else. (pp. 11-12)

This is a brief scene in one of Wendell’s shorter—and I think most personal novels—for which the Gospel account of the Prodigal Son is the archetype. Except it’s set in rural Kentucky about the time the horrors of World War II unleash themselves upon the earth. Floating in the pond is the boy’s brief glimpse of heaven—all of the world is together and he is simply part of it. While this scene is clearly the fusion of Wendell’s memory and imagination, such moments—in life and in art—are essential to learning who we are and what we are for. We are supposed to belong to the whole and if we do not, we squander the value and purpose of our lives. And, just as the Prodigal Son comes to his senses in the pigsty, we must return to our home and our father’s love—we must live our lives within the Father’s order. Or else we’re not really living and we have lost our purpose.

Those of us who have never sought to escape the Father’s order have our ongoing responsibilities, however, chief of which is to do our part to renew and maintain that order. Here’s is Wendell’s short poem from 1968 that shows a man attempting to regain the Father’s order in the midst of a great spiritual rupture, the Viet Nam War:

February 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

War spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

Wendell understood that you have to start somewhere with anything one sets out to do. I took a course with him in his last year of teaching at the University of Kentucky. He called the course Pastoral Poetry, and had a liberal sense of what that entailed. We read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, part of The Faerie Queen, Wordsworth’s parable of a shepherding family, “Michael,” and Jane Austen’s Emma, among other canonical works of British literature. Wendell’s mode of instruction was simply to point out passages in the works. He’d read a handful of lines or a couple of paragraphs and simply say, “That’s good writing.” He wasn’t simply observing the writer’s skill or cleverness. He was drawing our attention to evidence of the continuity found in substantial art, just as one finds continuity in the oak tree—if one bothers to look. At the beginning of each class, Wendell asked us a single question based on our reading assignment. We were to answer the question in exactly one sentence. This was a means to get us to write beyond grammatical correctness, and to practice the deeper skills needed to write with purpose, as the first steps of our own efforts to write with our own grasp of continuity. Very often Wendell would read our one-sentence replies and twist his face in disapproval. One day, exasperated, he simply said, “You have to write a good sentence.” That is a lesson I have been trying to learn for thirty-seven years. It has been an imperfect progress.

A couple of years ago I was a participant in the annual Kentucky Arts and Letters Day held at The Berry Center in New Castle. It was time for Gray Zeitz, fellow poet and the proprietor of Larkspur Press, which has published many letterpress editions of Wendell’s writings for over 50 years. Gray walked to the front and read a handful of his wonderful and whimsical Zen-like poems, smiled once he had finished and ambled back to his seat. I happened to be sitting next to Wendell for this reading. After Gray began walking back Wendell remarked to no one in particular, “I’d bet that man has never hurried a day in his life.” I am certain that is true, just as I know Wendell was an affectionate and curious observer of people because he loved us.

I have been fortunate to have excellent teachers and mentors, but Wendell was the best teacher I ever had, not just for writing, but for being a citizen of this world. His life and his work have been great gifts, and he gave them freely and very often with a huge guffaw and a slap of his hand on a bony thigh.

“Wendell Berry’s Difficult Hope.” Michael Lamb shares how Wendell Berry helped him articulate authentic hope: “Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “every work of genius” enables us to ‘recognize our own rejected thoughts’ and then gives them ‘back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’ That was Berry’s genius. He clothed my intellectual and moral formation on the farm with majesty, helping me see it as the fertile ground it had always been.”

“Honoring Wendell Berry.” A few weeks ago, I talked with Ken Myers about Wendell Berry’s legacy to honor the fiftieth anniversary of The Unsettling of America. Ken’s Friday Feature includes part of that conversation and further reflections on Berry’s work. Our full conversation is out now as well.

“Delicious Life.” Elizabeth Stice remembers her grandmother: “I never heard my grandmother expound her philosophy of life, but I think it was partially reflected in her final word. Delicious. Despite everything. Because of everything.”

“On AI, Bernie Is the Last Conservative.” Gregory Conti reflects on the odd situation that has a progressive taking a conservative stance on AI: “Artificial intelligence is the ultimate devil you don’t know. The widespread embrace of it is certainly a ‘perilous adventure.’ But almost alone in our political class, it is not a conservative but America’s best-known socialist who is proposing a pause on AI development and a permanent ban on the development of artificial superintelligence.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)

“Statement.” Details are still disputed, but according to this report from Tristan Buckmaster, it appears OpenAI’s model may have solved a math problem by, at least in part, incorporating data into its training from two mathematicians working on a similar problem: “I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.” Regardless, OpenAI has behaved very strangely during this process.

“The Race to Keep Cheating.” Alex Bronzini-Vender details the cat-and-mouse game as it unfolds at “elite” colleges: “If higher education loses the struggle against AI, Carr believes, it won’t be for want of solutions. ‘If your wife is having an affair with the milkman,” she says, ‘it’s not that it’s so confusing about what to do.’ It’s just that ‘the solutions would be pretty annoying.’”

“Actually Existing Nun Girl Summer.” Sister Carino Hodder explains how even what seems like bureaucratic administration can be a source of delight: “Absolutely no one who asked me what this actual nun did on her Nun Girl Summer was expecting me to say that one of the most enjoyable and spiritually refreshing activities of the past couple of months was the process of revising our Book of Constitutions.”

“The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity.’” Maxwell Zeff talks with former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon about why many AI researchers think AI could eliminate humans yet continue the development race: “Evan Hubinger, the AI alignment lead at Anthropic, predicted in a post on X that there’s a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could kill all people in the next decade. That post was reposted by current and former researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic, some of whom said it was a common sentiment in the industry. What’s less obvious is how exactly these AI fears will come to pass and what the world is supposed to do about the concerns being raised by the people building AI.”

“How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now.” For a contrary take, and probably a more perceptive one, see Cal Newport’s argument about why alarmist claims can distract from present harms: “The observation that the most alarmist claims about A.I.’s impact seem to come from the individuals most connected to Rationalism should anger us. This exaggerated grimness makes it easy to overlook the more immediate harms created by these technologies, such as their potential use in cybersecurity attacks, excess resource consumption, impact on our cognitive fitness, role in undermining education and amplification of soul-deadening slop.”

“There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab.’” Matthew Sun wants to stop calling AI companies “labs”: “Ultimately, AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t tweedy labs doing arcane research—they’re industry-defining corporations reshaping our workplaces, our schools, and our communities.”

“College Campuses Need to be Liberated from their Administrators.” Barry Lam traces how administrative bloat and technological solutions burden colleges: “For the last few years, Washington University in St. Louis has been working to get software to do the same job, integrating graduation requirements with enrollment, transcripts, and financial aid systems. It’s part of a software system that has cost the school $99 million to implement. At that price, the school could have hired 20 work-study students for well over a century. A faculty member at Wash U who is also a student adviser tells me that some students now need an hour to figure out if they have satisfied their major requirements, using a piece of the software so unwieldy that it requires ongoing mitigation, updates, and video training for staff, faculty, and students.”

1

At 8:10 a.m. Chicago time I am lying in bed reading when the phone rings. “Turn on your TV. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,” my wife shouts into the phone, then hangs up. I go down to the finished room in the basement and turn on the TV. The picture shows both towers with gaping holes in them smoking away. When I see that both towers have been struck, I am almost without breath. I flip channels: everyone’s on it, no exceptions. On every channel the anchors are talking slowly, letting huge gaps occur between words and taking long pauses between sentences. They are trying to fill time and looking left and right for help because all they have to say is said by these two towers just standing there smoking into the sky. And then, because I have a dental appointment in a few minutes, I quarantine my breathlessness and gaping eyes.

My dentist is not in today. His replacement introduces herself to me as Dr. Liz. She’s only a couple months out of dental school, not more than 25. Even with her surgical mask on I can see she’s a fledgling. It’s only my semi-annual checkup and cleaning, so it’s not a big deal if I get a rookie. Still, where is my dentist? I have been seeing him and his son for over 15 years now. Through her surgical mask Dr. Liz says, “He’s not in today. His daughter might be on the flight from Boston to L.A.” For the next 45 minutes her words hang in the air like neon hieroglyphs.

As Dr. Liz works, she talks and I go uh-huh. Her talk is like a small sparrow hopping from one branch to another. One moment she is telling me about the mutual fund she just bought and worrying it will plummet on this news. Then she is worrying that if the next attack is in Chicago the water might not be safe to drink. Then she is wiping away tears of fear for the dentist’s daughter. Then back to the mutual fund, the attack on Chicago, the people in New York, the dentist’s daughter. All the while she is scraping away tartar. Intermittently, when she pulls the instruments out of my mouth and tells me to rinse, I gush out my own words that have been racing around in my head since I first looked at my TV an hour earlier. Though the attack was inevitable, I tell the fledgling, I had imagined it differently: many suitcase bombs in washrooms of famous buildings going off at the same time; planes spraying anthrax or nerve gas into the air over multiple cities on the same day; a biological or chemical agent introduced into the ventilating systems of large buildings in multiple cities on the same day; the poisoning of the water in many cities at the same time. Or a Black Sunday scenario. Who could stop a plane loaded with explosives from flying right down into the Super Bowl? Our country is there for the picking.

But something is calming me too. Outside the window is an impossibly blue sunlit sky on one of the most perfect days one could ask for. I am watching the light on the leaves of the trees just outside this office and thinking how beautiful it is and how lucky we are to live in such a world. And then I am wondering whether we have this beautiful world any more. Have we been stockpiling our innocence for decades, like so much money in a bank, only to see that our currency is counterfeit?

And then I wonder who created this attack? If it is Osama bin Laden, as the announcer on the little TV near the receptionist’s desk keeps suggesting, I suspect it is the result of a deeply felt grievance. But I know almost nothing about this man with a perpetually smiling gentle face. I don’t even know how to spell his name. And then I realize how little I know about anything, how so much of what I “know” amounts to sentences someone else has written about someone else or photographs someone else has taken of someplace else. So much of what we “know” in the modern world is second- and third-hand. We no longer know with our fingers and hands and ears and eyes; we know through someone else’s words.

As Dr. Liz is scraping away, I keep seeing a picture I saw in the paper a few days ago of three Muslim women wrapped in chadors crying over the killing of a Muslim boy by Israeli soldiers. It isn’t the killing or the sorrow or the revenge I am seeing as I look at this picture in my mind’s eye. It is the herd I keep seeing, for this picture conjures up countless other pictures of Muslim women wrapped from head to toe in black, always the same outfit, a woolen prison they put on each day quite willingly because, I imagine, they are allowed to know so little of any other way to be, because they have been forced to be this way from birth. These women aren’t the cause of this attack—they themselves have been silently and ubiquitously attacked by enforced ignorance every day of their lives—but the pictures of them are an emblem of the cause. That cause is the unthinking herd that believes it knows the truth and demands everyone else know the same truth. No dialogue is possible with such people, for the truth as they know it is God-given. Such people who do not think, but instead believe, and therefore know, are the real seeds of this attack. It is in this dark bed of knowing that the seed of this attack was nourished into flower.

But before we feel superior to these people, we ought to reflect on our own condition. All of us who pray to saints (of whom we know little more than a sentence or two but whose icons have been with us from childhood), all of us who bend over rosary beads racing through words to order up the things we want from this world, all of us whose practice of our religion is little more than a kind of superstition that tries to manipulate the universe for our own narrow ends, like winning football games or the lottery: are we essentially any different from these terrorists?

Yes, some of us are, but only in two respects, and only thinly so. In addition to all the superstitions and pressures of the herd that we grew up with—my classmates and I hoped we would be courageous enough to face martyrdom—we were also nourished on a belief in the rights and liberties of the individual and a belief in the power of reason. This belief in individual liberties and the power of reason is all that separates us from these terrorists. It is a terribly thin veneer, and beneath this veneer always pressing to explode is the overwhelming power of the herd. If you doubt this, reflect for a moment on the way the Roman Church treated heretics, Galileo, Jews; reflect on the way Americans treated blacks for centuries. Reflect on the Salem witch trials, the intolerance of some Christian fundamentalists, the immense, unbearable weight of political correctness.

The herd: it is one of the things I most fear, not just from terrorists but from my fellow citizens, even from my friends and family. It is always there pressing, wanting all of us to conform. Even when conforming is ridiculous, like the wearing of shredded jeans that cost hundreds of dollars or 4-inch spiked shoes that destroy the wearers’ feet.

I am thinking right now of an altogether very decent bunch of guys I get together with a couple of times a month. We call it a Men’s Group. It has been going on for nearly twelve years now, but I never sit through a meeting that I’m not keenly aware of all the politically correct ways I am expected to think and speak and behave. There are no written codes—written codes may be the weakest codes of all—but there is a certain something always insisting on what is permissible and not permissible to say. When I risk uttering an impermissible thought, I watch myself slipping away in their eyes.

Just now the voice on the TV announces that the second World Trade Center tower has collapsed. The TV also announces that some kind of attack has taken place at the Pentagon.

When Dr. Liz is half way through with my mouth, word comes that the dentist’s daughter was not on that flight; she missed it “by five minutes.” And my fledgling doctor has tears in her eyes.

At the desk, as I’m paying for today’s treatment, the tiny TV is covering the news of the attack. In the background the piped-in radio is playing the Bee Gees’s “How Deep Is Your Love?” No one says a word about the irony.

Outside I walk across a lawn still wet with dew. The grass is thick and green and heartbreakingly beautiful.

In my car driving to my next stop, I don’t feel quite real, and at the same time I feel perfectly normal. I am running my errands, following my schedule; it is all very normal, but I’m doing everything inside a bell jar.

I pull up to the drive-in lane at my bank. I’m depositing some checks. I fill out the deposit slip, sign the checks, put them into a vacuum tube. A few minutes later the receipt comes back to me. The teller says nothing about what’s happened; she just apologizes for taking “so long.”

My next stop is a neighbor’s house. I have never met this person. He lives at the other end of my block. His wife proposed a block co-op to share skills and tools, and I am returning the questionnaire she put in my door a few days earlier. But this house happens also to be the same architecture as mine, only with a large addition at the rear. For years I have wanted to see the inside of this house to get an idea how an addition to my own house might look. I ring the bell, introduce myself, and my neighbor, whom I’ve never seen before, invites me in.

Neither of us mentions the attack. We talk as if today were an ordinary day. The entire conversation is about the addition. I notice a lovely garden at the rear, a peaceful green place with two enormous shrubs in the middle of the yard, not along the edge. The way these shrubs block off the back side of the yard makes the back of the lot a kind of secret garden. I like secret gardens: hedges that wall off a green private space. They just might be the most beautiful spaces in this whole world. And then I think we may not have such places any more. And then I know I’m overreacting.

At the door our conversation ends when my neighbor tells me he’s retired (though he looks to be only in his early 50s), that he used to be a CPA, that with the stock market plunge of the last year and a half he might have to return to work but that will be especially difficult because the field of public accounting is continually in flux and he wouldn’t know it well any more. I tell him I thought the laws of accounting were as fixed and immutable as stone. No, he says, public accounting is always changing. At no point do either of us mention the attack. We talk as if the world were just fine, as if the rules binding it together were as immutable as I had thought the laws of accounting were.

My next errand, which I determined to take care of two days ago, is to use the battery tester at the hardware store to see which of my used AA batteries have enough life left in them to keep. I stand at the end of the counter testing one battery after another. There are a couple of other people at the counter, and I feel like I’m in the way, but I keep on testing any way. Three-quarters of them are “replace,” one is at the high end of “replace,” and four are “good.” After some deliberation, I throw away the “replace” ones and keep the one at the high end of “replace” and the good ones. As I’m testing the batteries, I think how surreal all this is: testing 50-cent batteries while our country is under attack and thousands have just been killed. And I haven’t heard a single conversation about it in the store, not one.

Walking back to my car with the good batteries, I suddenly remember the day Kennedy was assassinated: the utter finality of that day, the sharp divide that day made in our lives, the way everybody later remembered exactly where they were when they heard the news of the assassination. I conjure it again as I’m crossing the street. My mother waking me in the early evening from an all-day sleep after working the third shift in a printing plant. Her standing just inside my bedroom door, the hall light high up and behind the silhouette of her head. The brass-rung bookcase beside my bed. Her voice, nervous and matter-of-fact at the same time, saying Kennedy had been assassinated. My disbelief at first. Then after a minute the thought that Johnson had lured Kennedy to Texas to assassinate him. It’s all there etched forever. And then I think how much less significant that day was than this one. Oswald’s was a single mission. Kennedy’s was a single death. Today’s attack is vastly larger and reaches vastly further. And it is only the beginning. That’s what I am thinking as I cross the street and watch the bright sunlight wash the asphalt parking lot.

At home my youngest son has left a message on my answering machine. He wants to know if I know what has been happening . . . in the world today. He pauses before “in the world.” And then he emphasizes in the world today and hangs up. He simply doesn’t have the words to describe what has happened or what he is feeling. Neither do I. That is why I am trying to set it down now.

My next errand is to Jewel’s and Dominic’s. I have to return a bag of powdered sugar, a bag of brown sugar, a pound-cake mix, a bag of chopped nuts, a bottle of Henri’s salad dressing, and two boxes of Shake ‘n Bake. My wife had bought them God knows when, but two days ago I got frustrated trying to find room in the fridge and cabinets, so I removed everything that was unopened and we were not likely to use and stacked them up for return to the store. Today was the day for that return, no matter that the plate tectonics of existence had sent one plate slamming over another. Today was also the day I had set aside to pick up sale items at both stores: two boxes of red raspberries for the price of one, two bottles of cider for the price of one, two cartons of orange juice for the price of one, nectarines at less than half price, some lettuce and hamburger buns I needed for the rest of the week. On the spur of the moment I pick up some cashews too.

While I am picking out the lettuce, a disembodied voice says that the sprayer will now spray the vegetables “to keep them fresher.” Over the hissing of the sprayer and Gene Kelly bouncing through “Singin’ in the Rain” I can hear the store’s PA system playing “Sometimes All I Need Is the Air That I Breathe.” My mind conjures an image of all those people trapped in the smoke of those towers. I wonder about the air they needed to breathe. And then I remember a mugger’s life-and-death choke hold on me late one night three weeks ago. For the two minutes that we struggled, each of us with all our might, all I could think of was AIR. Air was the only thing in the world. I buy six ciders and four O.J.s because they are terrific buys. They are out of raspberries so I get a rain check. No one is talking about the attack in the store. Is it all my imagination? I wonder as I’m standing in the checkout line. But then two men and a woman behind me bring it up. One of the men says it’s going to cause havoc for the lawyers; he is grinning at the other two; they smile back feebly.

Out in the parking lot I look up at the trees that are all around this neighborhood, the trees and the blue sky—and the light seems to be light from a movie set, something out of a David Lynch movie, the white light filmmakers use to suggest an alien world. I imagine I am walking in slow motion. I am aware that each step is one of a kind, that each step is always a thing that happens only once, that no matter how many steps we might take in our lives each one is a thing unto itself, an unrepeatable event. I know this is strange thinking.

I suddenly realize why all day I have been afraid to say anything to anyone else about what has happened. It’s because I don’t know what to say and because anything I would say would be a cliché, mere mumbling; maybe that’s why everyone else is so silent too. They don’t know what to say either; we’re all inside our separate bell jars. We are all walking in slow motion counting our steps, knowing each of them to be precious and unique. We are all wordless in the face of this day. We are all buying items on sale and glad to get them. The whole world has been on bargain sale all our lives, and we hardly noticed.

At home I unpack the groceries and think how silly my life is, how silly I have just behaved: buying groceries on sale at such a time! testing batteries! examining a room addition! doing my banking! It is all so terribly ordinary, so peripheral. This peripherality reminds me of another day: the night of the rioting in Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic convention. I remember that night especially well not because I was there but because I listened to it on the radio as I was building two very large bookcases in my father’s driveway. Though it was 33 years ago, I can still remember how I was dressed: khaki shorts, a black crew neck shirt, and brown sandals. I drove in nails all through the rioting. When I was done, there were bloody heads everywhere and two bookcases I am still using today.

That day comes back to me at this moment because of the coincidence of an extraordinary story happening in the larger world while I was doing something terribly ordinary in my own small world. The day also comes back to me because then too I had mixed feelings about what was taking place; I was out of step, so to speak. At the time I was on the side of the rioters; I was required to be. I was, and still am, a college teacher, and every college teacher was required to be on the side of the rioters, the so-called students. The herd, you see. But in some dim corner of my being I did not feel what they were doing was right. Though I could not have articulated it then, I knew these students were being self-indulgent, that what they really longed to be was martyrs, but martyrs with only a little blood on their heads, not real martyrs but martyrs who could use this night and their bit of blood to tell stories of their heroism and righteousness the rest of their lives. I knew, that is to say, that these guys were self-indulgent, posing phonies.

But of course I knew no such thing. I merely felt it in some hidden corner of my being. I did not even know that I felt it. Only in reimagining it years later, when it was safe to know what I felt, did I realize what that odd feeling was that I had that night as I built my bookcases; only then did I know these rioters to be poseurs more interested in cheap heroism, getting laid, and avoiding a war they might have to fight in than they were in justice and democracy.

Just now, as I am writing, though, I find myself once again reevaluating: Were they all poseurs? Was cheap glory their only motive? Of course not. There was a real wish to end the Vietnam War and not just for selfish reasons; there was a real wish to restore democracy to our political process. But I cannot escape the feeling that these wishes were driven from beneath by a narcissistic desire to shine like heroes, to be more righteous than thou, and this narcissism was so wallpapered over by slogans and bumper stickers, so hidden from view by hypocrisy that the whole night has stunk to high heaven ever since I uncovered the feeling that lay hidden inside me that night building bookcases.

Its stink was especially bad because when I uncovered that feeling I also uncovered the fact that I too had engaged in such behavior. I wasn’t out on the street that night, but in any conversation about the subject of the war or the demonstrators, I mimicked the party line. And I did this for years, driven not by the desire to be a hero but rather out of a much smaller desire: the wish to be accepted, to be liked. I wanted to be part of the herd. It is enormously difficult to renounce the herd at any age, but especially when you are young. The cops that night were just as phony, or should I say half-phony, for like the demonstrators, they too had mixed motives, one posing on top of the other, justice covering up screaming hatred. The twoness of motive: we can never avoid it.

What I am most remembering, though, isn’t the half-phoniness of the demonstrators or the cops; it is the feeling that on that night in August of 1968 I shouldn’t have been building bookcases. I don’t know what I should have been doing, witnessing it and writing about it, I suppose, something, anything, but not building bookcases, for God’s sake.

So this time I am writing about what has happened. Or rather I am trying to watch my own mind wrestle with what has happened and to write about the wrestling match. I am supposed to do my usual mile swim this afternoon, but I am giving it up, something I don’t do lightly, in order to continue wrestling and watching the wrestling .

2

I spend all afternoon setting down the above. I am interrupted only once, by my son calling me back. We talk for some minutes. I tell him—again it leaps out of my mouth like a Jack in the Box—how inevitable the attack was, how ripe for plucking everything in America is. I rehearse once again all the scenarios. Some minutes into the conversation, however, I am overcome with emotion and cannot speak. The phone line sits silent, only emptiness between us. After some seconds I find my voice, it is husky, and we go on.

Only at 6:30, when I have finished setting it all down, do I notice I am starving. I toss together a dinner of leftover hamburgers using those buns and lettuce I bought, and throw in the nuts and some leftover chicken.

Finally, I allow myself to do what I have been aching to do all day: watch the news on TV. Every channel is playing this story without commercials all night long. Often it is the same picture and speaker from one channel to another. In a lighter moment, I realize there is a good side to this tragedy. No commercials. Even better, there mustn’t have been any soaps on this morning, but best of all, there couldn’t have been any of those infuriating, cheaply-made children’s cartoons that public TV endlessly throbs at us at an ungodly cranked up volume all day every day.

But tonight the TV is hypnotic. I watch it from seven till midnight. After a couple of hours I want to get up and get things done, but I cannot. Every time my body moves to get up my head slumps back into the pillows on the floor. I know I’m wasting my time. The news is so fragmentary. Nearly everybody who speaks is guessing who did it, how it happened, what the results will be. It will only become real news in the days and months ahead, when actual facts are discovered.

Right now this parade of people is only a Greek chorus chanting strophes of sorrow. But that is why I can’t stop watching and listening. I know there will be no real news tonight, but I want to be there, wherever the sorrow is, and I don’t understand why. My watching helps no one. But I want to be there nonetheless. As much as I hate the herd, I want to be part of it.

We are always, always two ways at once. That is why the Greek chorus chants strophes while walking in one direction and antistrophes while walking the opposite way. We cannot have a thought without a counter-thought; we cannot have a feeling without a counter-feeling; we cannot have a wish without a counter-wish. It is one of the reasons I took up writing: to get at the twoness of truth, of life, the otherness one could only know if one tried hard to write the truth. This twoness: it was something you stumbled into, not something you set out to find, for you didn’t even know it existed until you fell over yourself into it. It wasn’t knowable except upon reflection, and writing was the only way I found to do this reflection. What the serious writer wants is not just to make lovely sentences about the moon (though he wants that too); what he most wants is to see the other side of the moon, the place where truth does not shine but lies in the dark.

On the TV the people in the street are saying they just want to be where the sorrow is. Every last one of them is inarticulate. They say it is so horrible. They say they want to help. They say they are so sad. They say they are overwhelmed. They say they don’t understand. They say they don’t know what to say. In their inarticulateness, they are the most plaintive and honest voices of the chorus. There are shots of people in churches in New York and Chicago, praying or crying silently or kneeling mutely or staring blankly.

And I think of the herd again. I am remembering the last scene of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which people who were trapped together for days on end at an endless dinner party (a party they wanted to be at when everything was superficial) are now so relieved to be free of each other they are flocking into church to give thanks. In this flocking together again, they are ironically recreating the very circumstances they want to give thanks for being delivered from. In the moment of their entry into the church, the camera suddenly shows a flock of sheep flowing through the door. I am reminded that the word “gregarious,” which means “seeking and enjoying the company of others,” is derived from the Latin for “belonging to a flock” and that “congregation” is drawn from the same source. For all our insistence on independence, we do so like to be sheep.

It is too large for them and it is too large for me. They have chosen to flock together, and I to sit alone, and in my solo pondering I find myself remembering Thornton Wilder’s meditation on disaster, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. A bridge collapses while five people, each of them strangers to each other, are crossing it. Why these five? Why should their lives be brought together at this particular place and time and why should their lives come to an end so suddenly? And what force has brought it to an end? As I look at the TV screen, I keep thinking: it could have been me. It could have been me. Only now do I realize this thought has been streaming in and out of my head since my time in the dentist’s chair; this thought has been a private Greek chorus of one marching back and forth inside my head all day long. And I have felt blessed and guilty and sad about it all day long. But I have been only half-conscious of these emotions throughout the day. Only now am I able to pay attention to what I have been feeling. And I suddenly realize this might be why I and the people in the stores and the bank were not talking about this mass murder in New York: because we knew it could just as well have been us. And perhaps a few of us realized that if we lived in the Middle East, we might have been cheering on the murderers. If the herd sometimes stops us from talking, perhaps twoness also stops us from talking.

The curious thing is that I do not yet feel anger. At one point Cardinal George is interviewed, and he is asked how people should respond to this tragedy. He says they should respond with compassion, not just for the victims but for the perpetrators as well. Cardinal George has one of those open, impassive faces that seems to take in the world without judgment. It is a beautiful face because it is so humble and so open, but when the reporter asks how we can be compassionate toward the perpetrators, his face narrows and his eyes bore in—it is the only time I have ever seen this happen to his face—and he says with sharpness in his voice, “How else can we behave? Should we become like them?”

Off and on the rest of the night I find myself wondering about this exchange. If you are a Christian (or Jew, Muslim, or Buddhist) and really practice your faith, how else can you behave? And yet how many of us do? I don’t love my enemies. For all their practiced looks of devotion and gestures of piety, do my fellow parishioners? Which leads me to wondering if religion is in accord with human nature. Loving an enemy is perhaps the most unnatural thing in the world, along with not being afraid in war.

But some people do love their enemies. I believe this because I have experienced wanting to love my enemies, imagining loving my enemies, and on occasion almost loving my enemies, but most of all because on rare occasions the media reports on a few others who actually do it. If some have loved their enemies, then loving one’s enemies must be in accord with some part of nature. It dawns upon me that the problem isn’t existence but accessibility: it is simply extremely difficult to access this part of our nature. But it is there nonetheless. Most of the time, however, we experience only the counterfeit of such emotion, the person who is only pretending to love the person he hates. Sometimes that person does this consciously, as a device of righteousness and power over the other; sometimes he is unconscious of his hatred, thinks he is actually loving when he is only behaving according to the code of the herd so that he can think well of himself, all the while covering up his hatred. Still, on rare occasions, I think I have seen the real thing.

I imagine such a moment to be the most complete letting go, not just of anger but of fear, that a human being can know. I imagine such a moment to be the happiest moment we are capable of as human beings. In such a moment must be the passing away of all guilt and sorrow and anxiety and desire; such a moment must feel like the end for which we were put on earth.

Each channel on the TV keeps playing two images over and over. Anyone remembering this day decades from now will remember these two images. They are being burned into our memories. Over and over and over I watch the plane, so sleek and lazy-looking, cruising so easily, banking ever so slightly, then plunging directly into the World Trade Center. Two things keep amazing me each time I watch this image. The plane doesn’t come out the other side of the building. My eyes keep expecting it to, but it doesn’t; it just disappears. The other thing that keeps amazing me is that I keep expecting the top of the building to come tumbling off or the whole building to topple over each time the plane hits it, but neither happens. The plane simply disappears and the building keeps standing. How is that possible? I keep wondering. The crash seems to defy nature.

The other image that keeps playing over and over all night long is the plummeting of the tower. For some seconds the picture shows the tower standing there smoldering; then suddenly these soaring vertical lines drop in an enormous billowing heap.

I never get tired of watching either image. I watch them over and over and over; I can’t get enough of them. Sometimes they appear in a small screen while the anchor is talking or interviewing someone on the full screen; sometimes they fill the entire screen. Either way, I keep watching them almost the way one watches pornography, with eyes wide-open, unbelieving, guilty. For while there is horror in these images—a horror so enormous we can’t quite believe it, and so have to keep looking at it over and over—there is also a thrill. I hesitate to use this word “thrill” for fear the herd will condemn such a thrill, but it is there, nonetheless. I can’t eradicate it. It is the thrill of witnessing history in the immediate moment on a scale so vast and graphic it is unthinkable. It is the thrill of someone else’s tragedy. It is the thrill of violence.

Why do filmmakers and TV producers cram as much violence as they can onto the screen? Because we love it. Why do we pay astronomical prices to see boxers, not fictional characters, mind you, but real human beings, pummel each other to within an inch of their lives? In part, for the blood, the damage, the smashing, crushing punishment. If it is bloody, it is irresistible. Never mind what we should feel, that is what we do feel. Why do we watch cars race each other at 200-plus miles an hour? We may lie to ourselves, but in part we are there for the crash. And the horror today is about as violent as you can get. It is the thrill of pornography, the thing we are forbidden to see, the thing we don’t want to see but which, once seen, we cannot turn our eyes away from, for we do want to see it. That is why every station keeps playing these two images over and over and over.

I did not like writing the above paragraph. I did not like admitting the thrill of those images, the thrill of this tragedy, but I believe it is a thrill for all of us, and the sooner that is admitted the sooner we can have an honest sorrow rather than engage in sentimentality. For sentimentality is false emotion, the emotion we conjure up because we want to cry or because we are expected to cry; it is a false sorrow we seek out so that we might have the pleasure of our tears. If we are not honest about the pleasure such violent scenes afford us, we will never be able to be honest about our sorrow. It will be a sham.

There is another pleasure to what we are all watching. It is the pleasure of high drama. The stakes are as high as they get. The actors are the high and mighty. And the script is being written in this very moment. The consequences will be colossal, and the outcome is in doubt. And we are participants, we are on stage too, we are part of the show, we could even be next. We thought we knew what we wanted for the last quarter century when we sought out bigger and better material comforts—houses, cars, boats, vacations, every one a trophy to ease and ego. But the pursuit of these things obscured what we most want from our lives: a meaningful experience, to have a life which is experienced, not just planned out for the maximum of comfort and prestige, and for that experience to be meaningful. Without taking a step out of our houses, we are being provided with an experience of the highest order, and it is powerfully meaningful. We have fallen into meaning, and it will be with us for years: every time we open a newspaper, hear a plane overhead, or ride an elevator up a skyscraper.

There is another pleasure I am aware of just now; it is the pleasure of writing about all this, for there is a deep satisfaction in identifying what one is seeing and experiencing and a deep pleasure to being able to shape what one is experiencing into words. Other writers, or artists of any kind, will know exactly what I mean; even good readers or lovers of art will know what I mean. The writing, the thing I am doing at this moment with these very words, is part of the experience; if I weren’t writing it, the experience would be less focused, less formed, the connections would not come into being or if they did, would only drop back moments later into the void from which they came. Writing is a way of holding an experience from falling back into the void, holding it long enough to really look at it. We don’t see what’s before us until we pay attention—really pay attention—and writing is the most acute way of paying attention that I know of. It comes at a cost, of course: it requires time and effort. That is why we call it paying attention. But it also has a rich payoff: our experience is slowed down and perceived, not just looked at but looked through, x-rayed, if you will. It is no longer a tumbling of images, actions, and emotions one after the other. Our experience now becomes saturated in perception and from such perception meaning may arise. This depth of perception and the discovery of meaning are what make writing one of the deepest pleasures in life—even when the experience one is writing about is as gruesome and horrible as this attack has been.

There is another pleasure in all this immense suffering. It is the pleasure of oneness. Every day each of us lives in a pocket of isolation, cut off from the rest of mankind, with the possible exception of a few friends and family members. But today one can see that we are one, after all. The lines of people waiting to give blood say so. The sorrow etched on the faces of these people in the street for people they don’t even know says so. The fact that all the TV stations in America, and probably the rest of the world, are tuned exclusively and without commercial break to this event and that virtually everyone in America and the rest of the world is watching at the same time says so. The churches filled with people praying not for their own wishes but for the souls of others, people they don’t even know, say so. I haven’t seen anything like this since the day President Kennedy was assassinated. I am suddenly aware that in some unknown part of my being I have been longing for this oneness for nearly forty years. A holy or an unholy longing, some poet might call it. Why must it always be a tragedy that delivers it? Because nothing else is powerful enough to break the hold the individual ego has upon each of our private and selfish selves.

Somewhere in the middle of all this watching and thinking, my friend Gerard Hanley calls me from New York. I had tried reaching him a number of times during the morning and afternoon. When I called his home on Staten Island the line was dead. I dialed his number over and over and nothing happened. I thought it would be foolish to bother calling his law office in mid-town Manhattan, but lacking any other way to reach him, I finally tried and immediately reached his voice mail and left a message.

Now, at nine o’clock, he calls me back. He tells me that he had gone down to the ferry this morning to take a ride into Manhattan because he had to go to the World Trade Center to pick up a document. He does not own a TV and always walks the mile down to the boat alone, so he did not know about the tragedy until he arrived at the dock. Once there, he saw what appeared to be the entire southern end of Manhattan on fire. Almost the only visible thing was smoke and fire and the remaining burning tower of the Trade Center. “At one point I turned away,” he says, “and when I looked back the tower had vanished. It happened so fast I missed it in the few seconds I was looking over at Brooklyn. One good thing,” he adds, “we won’t have those ugly towers blocking the skyline any longer. They were like giant phallic symbols. They were inviting someone to do this.”

The conversation goes on for half an hour. Throughout it, and afterward, I find myself wondering just how much America and some other nations have set themselves up for a fall. Literally. We build the biggest towers we can across the skyline of every major city; we strut our stuff down main street with the swagger of an outsized bully (not that we are a bully, mind you, but so often we strut like one) and we are shocked when someone knocks the chip off our shoulder. Why is that so surprising? It is no wonder that terrorists have not once but twice chosen the World Trade Center as a target. They chose it to knock our phallic strutting down to earth. We have the right to build such towers, of course, but maybe it’s not good manners. And now it’s probably not even good business. What will office space in the Sears Tower or a condo in the Hancock Building be selling for next week?

But when I get off the phone something else occurs to me. These terrorists are just as guilty of swagger and strutting as we are. Those sleek, tubular planes were just as much phallic symbols as those towers were: they flew their stolen phalluses into ours. And just what are all those Mercedes Benzes, those harems, those dozens of palaces all owned by the same few sheiks about? Mere pleasure? No, the same swagger we are guilty of.

We didn’t talk about it, but I am remembering now that Gerard spent a year in Afghanistan in the mid-60s. He was in the Peace Corps, and the only way he could get from one town to another was by horse. Sometimes it was an overnight journey. One of the things that still astonishes him a third of a century later is how incredibly friendly and honest the people were. You could not—every time he tells the story he nearly shouts could not—spend the night alone on the road. Some villager had to take you in, and you had to accept a meal from him. The twoness of everything, I find myself thinking again. Terrorism—treating utter strangers as enemies whose lives are to be snuffed out without thought—and kindness—treating utter strangers as kin.

When we get off the phone, the TV is replaying the president’s speech for perhaps the third time in my viewing tonight. This time I am struck by his calling the act of the terrorists “cowardly.” For the first time I actually think about that word. The previous times I simply accepted the language; I silently agreed with it without realizing I was agreeing. It was automatic language, and it was automatic listening, which is to say it wasn’t listening, it was simply hearing. This time I realize it is automatic language—and entirely untrue. There was nothing cowardly about the attack; it required immense courage and conviction on the part of these hijackers. They knew they were going to die, and they chose to do so. That is an act of enormous courage, not cowardice. We characterize it as cowardice because it is guerrilla warfare and we have very little defense against such warfare. Yes, it was stealth (most successful war is), but it was not cowardice.

The president also characterized the act as “evil.” Here he was right, since so many innocent people were killed, but it is worth a moment’s thought. Did we not firebomb Dresden during World War II, killing some 100,000 people, mostly civilians? Did we not bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ultimately killing hundreds of thousands of civilians? Yes, we would say, but it was necessary, especially the latter two acts. In the end they saved hundreds of thousands of lives. I would agree about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but was Dresden necessary? Most historians would say no. It could be defended only as a retaliation for what the Germans had mercilessly done to Britain for years. A stick for a stone. Their herd for our herd.

I am back where I was earlier in the day: trying to understand this act. People don’t do such things without cause. What is the cause? Is justice being sought in this deed? And this is where I fail miserably, for I do not understand the situation in the Middle East. I am, of course, presuming that the terrorists were sponsored by Osama bin Laden or some other Arab faction in the Middle East, a presumption it seems nearly all of America shares. And I do not understand to what extent the Palestinians have just grievance for the situation they find themselves in. To what extent did the Jews wrongfully throw the Palestinians off their land? I do not know. I do know that for decades, ever since I read Exodus, I could only imagine the Jews as the good guys. It was a simple case of prejudice on my part. I judged without having the facts. I still don’t have the facts, but for the last decade and a half I have at least been wondering. I have become more open-minded. And that, I realize, is what all the parties here must become: the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Jews, we Americans, the Western World as a whole. If we don’t, we are condemned to live in suffering and tragedy. Suffering and tragedy are an inextricable part of human nature, but needless suffering and tragedy are not. We are under a moral requirement to avoid such needless tragedy. In the meantime we are at war with these terrorists. So we should find out who they are, hunt them down without regard to national borders, and kill them.

How contradictory I speak. How contradictory is this event. How contradictory is human nature. How contradictory is the world. Everything is two (or more) ways at once. Nothing is one way only. I hate the herd, but I cannot live without it. I want to tell the truth, but I also want to be liked.

When I quit the TV around midnight, I notice Peter Jennings has become so dog-tired he is having trouble forming sentences. He is managing it, but only with noticeable effort.

I end the evening by getting in my car and going to the gas station. One of the reports showed some gas stations gouging as much as $5 for a gallon of gas. (Did I say there was a oneness in the land?) The report reminded me that my tank was nearly empty. At this hour there will be no lines. In my neighborhood I don’t expect such gouging, but I want to avoid paying even 20 cents more a gallon.

I also want to find copies of the Sun-Times and the Tribune. Another report near the end of the evening showed the front pages of each paper. I’d like to have copies. If I said they were souvenirs, you’d get really upset. We don’t like to call them that, but just what are they, these papers with tragedies splashed in bold face type and big pictures all over the front page that we save for decades?

The gas is still the same price at my neighborhood station, but all the newspaper vending machines are totally empty. Must be other people want these papers too. I wonder what they call them. Probably keepsakes or mementos. We all feel better about such words. Decades from now we will call them collector’s items.

3

In the dream just before waking, I am trudging through deep, swirling, dead grass outside the house I used to live in with my family a long time ago. It was a solid brick home with a lovely garden, but now the grass is dead and swirls its death about my feet. I am pacing up and down outside the house because I cannot get in. This way and that I pace, trying to rehearse the piece I am to perform inside. It is to be a reading from memory of what I have just written. But I can’t remember any of the lines. I know I will fail when I get inside. I will go blank and talk without purpose or direction. The audience will be just as blank as I am. They will wonder why I am here, what I am doing, what all this aimless, drifting talk can possibly mean. I will be wondering the same thing.

As I am playing the dream back in my head, repeating it to myself so I can remember it, an enormous flying insect comes into the room and is flying this way and that along the far wall. It is searching for something, but I do not know what. Food? A mate? A place to lay its eggs? Light? (For it is still semi-dark in this room.) A way out? Or something that only insects know about? Light, I conclude, it wants light, and a way out. I am watching a furious striving of wings and the shadows of wings flickering this way and that along the wall, endlessly beating, seeking, striving. Back and forth. Back and forth. But there is no sense to this beating, just a crazy fury seeking a way out. There will be light right here by the window, as soon as I open the shade. But there is no way out. Nobody is going to open the window.

Berry was the first writer I encountered who made me seriously consider death: what constitutes a good death, as well as the good of death.

For Berry, death is an integral part of life. It is, like membership, a reality that defines all creation. In his well-known “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Berry commends us not to “Be afraid / to know your neighbors and to die,” for fearing death and trying to escape it will render us unable to “Practice resurrection.” Death is not a thing to flee from but a thing to be welcomed, not for its own sake but for what it brings.

He who works the land, as one of Berry’s poems pronounces, “enters into death / yearly, and comes back rejoicing.” Being a farmer, Berry knew that, as he wrote in his essay “Two Economies,” “in a time when death is looked upon with almost universal enmity, it is hard to believe that the land we live on and the lives we live are the gifts of death. Yet that is so and it is the topsoil that makes it so.” In The Unsettling of America Berry wrote that beings in an ecosystem are “indissolubly linked in complex patterns of energy exchange. They die into each other’s life, live into each other’s death.”

For Berry, all that is agricultural is a mirror and symbol and counterpart to human culture. So, too, with death: as the many necessary deaths of the natural world allow for further life, so death is the means by which we live in a spiritual sense. Darkness is the means by which we see and love the light. It is the way we know the world: as Jeff referenced in his reflection on Berry, when Berry’s character Hannah Coulter reflects on her husband Nathan’s death, she contends that “Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.”

In his Sabbath poem “The Farm,” (1991, IX), Berry commends the farmer to live—and die—like a tree:

More time, more light, more rain

Will make it grow again

Till it has realized

All that it can become

And then it dies into

More life, deserving more

By not desiring more.

Like trees, we die—or we ought to die—into more life. “Past life / Lives in the living,” another Sabbath poem pronounces. Or, as yet another poem names this truth, “Where the tree falls, the forest rises.” Evidently this is a truth of biology, but for Berry it is more than that, too. Before that ultimate and final waking into new life, we die into more life many times, and we live lives composed of many deaths:

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

You have become a sort of grave

containing much that was

and is no more in time, beloved

then, now, and always…

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

The lessons of death are manifold in Berry’s work. Many of Berry’s characters, most notably Jayber Crow and Andy Catlett, undergo a sort of deathly dark night of the soul through which they learn humility and grace and because of which their love for home grows. The last lines of the above Sabbath poem compresses those characters’ lessons into an implied imperative: give yourself away. Willingly and joyfully yield. Accept your lot with love. “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you.”

Berry’s poem “The Wish to Be Generous” likewise represents these lessons well. “All that I serve will die, all my delights / the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,” the poem begins. The world and its “silent lilies” and other beauties will pass away. To this Berry submits, writing:

Let the world bring on me

the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know

my little light taken from me into the seed

of the beginning and the end, so I may bow

to mystery, and take my stand on the earth

like a tree in a field, passing without haste

or regret toward what will be, my life

a patient willing descent into the grass.

Wendell Berry has taken his stand on the earth and finally, patiently, willingly descended into the earth that he loved and tended so well. We who remain, those who read and love his work, those who knew him and those who did not, would do well to follow his example.

I never met Wendell Berry. I never sat at his kitchen table or walked his Kentucky farm. My first encounter with his work came in seminary, when I believe Terry York, a poet and hymn writer, assigned What Are People For?

In the years after, Berry kept turning up. Eugene Peterson, whose writing continues to shape me, said he’d learned much of his pastoral theology from Berry. When Berry wrote about a farm, Peterson could often substitute the word “parish” and discover something true about the work of staying with a congregation.

Inevitably, I’d find Berry had impacted just about every modern writer or theologian I admired. The pattern was repetitive: I could pull on almost any thread I cared about, and Berry was somewhere upstream of it. And I’ve now read enough of his work to understand why. Even today, A Place on Earth is beside my chair with a bookmark somewhere near the middle.

I grew up in rural northeast Texas, on and around my grandparents’ land. My grandfather worked cows and kept a large garden. He had an eighth-grade education and ran a wholesale business selling candy and tobacco and notions, driving from one little store to another stocking the shelves himself. He smoked like a chimney. His life story was not the kind to make headlines.

When I began reading Berry’s Port William stories I never thought, this character is my grandfather. The people were Kentuckians, after all, and fully themselves. What startled me, though, was Berry’s attention. Berry saw people like my grandfather.

The people of Port William worked fields and cut hair. They cooked, gossiped, fought, got sick, and lost loved ones. They never forget who once owned that particular farm or why those two families still walk past each other at the post office without saying a word. Their bodies age, they make their mistakes, and Berry slowly gets the point across to readers: each life only looks small when viewed from far away.

I think I understood something about that before I had words for it. Most of the people who’ve loved me best are ones the wider world has little reason to notice. I notice because I belong to them, something Wendell learned quite early. As a boy in Henry County, Kentucky, he spent time with two neighboring farmers, Melvin and Marvin Ford, known as Meb and Mob to him. Both left school after the eighth grade, though Berry remembered them as some of his greatest teachers. Meb could take a boy through the countryside and tell him about animals and crops, about who’d lived where and what happened on a particular piece of ground.

Berry was born in 1934 into a family already bound up with Kentucky agriculture. His father, John Marshall Berry Sr., was a lawyer who spent much of his working life trying to organize tobacco farmers so they’d have some power against the companies who were setting the terms of their livelihood.

Berry did leave Kentucky. He studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford, traveled in Europe and taught at New York University. A literary career was opening up for him. But then he and Tanya went home. They eventually settled at Lanes Landing near Port Royal, along the Kentucky River. They went back because they wanted to. Berry later said that somewhere around then he realized he didn’t have to become a professional writer. He could be an amateur in the older sense of the word and “work for love.” Whatever the decision ultimately came to mean would be worked out over the decades that followed.

He and Tanya raised their children there while Berry farmed the land, wrote, and watched the countryside change all around them. Port Royal had once supported sixteen businesses in a town of scarcely a hundred people, even a millinery shop. Berry lived long enough to watch the local economies that sustained places like it grow thin.

One of the first essays in What Are People For? begins with Berry admitting he’d damaged his own land. He’d wanted a pond for livestock, so he had a bulldozer brought in. Berry didn’t understand the hillside well enough, the ground slipped, and a visible scar was left behind. There was a lesson in all of that Wendell never forgot.

Later in the same book Berry noticed an old, galvanized bucket hanging on a fence post. Rain got in. Leaves fell. Shells, feathers, insects and the remains of small things accumulated. The contents began to rot, and slowly, at the bottom of the bucket, dark humus formed.

That bucket was Berry’s picture of local culture: A remembered name, a retold story, a trade passed down. He’d watched the opposite happen. Young people left for cities and didn’t come back. Parents died, and home places were sold. Down the hill from his house stood an old store that had long since closed, and Berry could still tell you the exact day it closed, the name of the man who ran it, and stories about the people who once did business there. In one of his later conversations about agriculture, Berry pointed to the absurdity of a dairy farmer having to go to a grocery store to buy milk. You can almost hear his incredulity.

Berry asked hard questions partly because agricultural economists were talking about America having too many farmers. Fewer people on the land meant greater efficiency. But Berry wondered what else would vanish along with them. A farm might contain a household, a history and neighbors who needed one another in ways for which no ledger could account. Then there was the local knowledge, like how water moved across a field after a hard rain or how much a place could yield without being used up. Berry worried over these questions in his essays, and in his novels, these were also the concerns that entered the lives of Port William.

Berry called the people of Port William its “membership.” Burley Coulter, one of its less respectable citizens and one of its clearest voices, put it plainly: they are “members of each other,” the real difference is who knows it and who doesn’t. Even the dead remain part of the conversation. Hannah Coulter can sit in an empty house and discover that the people she has lost are still somehow involved in the life she is living.

Berry once said, “I don’t make any sense as an individual.” He was testifying about community, speaking of Tanya, his parents, his teachers and friends, his family, and his place. Take them away and the individual called Wendell Berry disappears.

This was one of those places where Eugene Peterson heard pastoral theology. It takes years to really know a congregation. You learn names and bury the dead and baptize the children, and eventually you discover which old story explains the tension nobody mentions aloud at the business meeting. Some people become dear to you while others remain difficult. And if you stay, the place begins to know you too.

Many of Berry’s Sabbath poems began as he walked on Sundays, even as pastors in pulpits elsewhere were reading Berry’s words to help their congregations. His relationship with institutional Christianity was, at times, uneasy, though the words and rhythms of scripture were rooted deep within him. He simply couldn’t understand a Christianity that praised the Creator while remaining incurious about damaged creation.

For Berry, the command to love our neighbor included the farmer, the land, and the laborer, the people who grew the food and the ones who ate it. Christ’s incarnation made it difficult to treat the body as only a temporary container for a soul headed somewhere better. Jesus, as Berry understood him, kept returning us to this world, to seeds and bread, laborers and landowners, meals and money. In “The Man Born to Farming,” Berry sees “the light lie down / in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.” Berry made some of that earthiness harder to overlook.

As young adults, my wife Christy and I spent a year serving in northern Thailand with the Upland Holistic Development Project, founded by our friends Rick and Ellen Burnette. The Burnettes’ work involved serving Palaung, Lahu, Karen, Akha, and Kachin communities as they navigated soil, crops, agroforestry, food security, and the practical work of helping people learn how to live from the land available to them without exhausting it.

Rick has invested much of his life in that kind of work, and after Berry died, Rick wrote that “no other writer, philosopher, and agrarian had as much influence and common sense as Wendell Berry.” He hoped Berry’s legacy would “help heal our broken land and expose the good that remains throughout creation.” I read those words and thought about the distance between Port Royal, Kentucky, and the hills of northern Thailand.

And all the while, Berry kept on writing from his place in Kentucky. The wider Berry’s influence grew, the more familiar his image became: white hair, weathered face, broad-brimmed hat, the old Kentucky farmer-writer looking out over the country he’d spent decades defending. There was something true in the image. The life he’d chosen had been worn into him. Still, a face, even a worn and weathered one, can only tell so much.

Berry knew some of this about himself. In “A Warning to My Readers,” he tells readers not to assume he was gentle simply because he praised gentleness. He described himself instead as “full / of fits and furies.” He could be stubborn and defensive with his editors. He wrote by hand and famously refused to buy a computer. Tanya typed his manuscripts on a Royal Standard typewriter, which prompted his critics to emphasize an obvious tension: Berry could reject a labor-saving machine in part because his wife was doing the typing.

Berry bristled at this. They knew almost nothing about his marriage, he argued, and even less about Tanya. He understood this as their shared work. Berry read the work aloud while Tanya listened, questioned, corrected and edited. She was his first reader and best critic. Her judgment shaped his writing.

Race is one of the places where Berry’s legacy is difficult to understand. With his book, The Hidden Wound, he offered an unusually candid effort by a white Southern writer to reckon with his own family’s slaveholding past. In later years, however, readers who had valued that effort sometimes struggled with Berry’s reflections on Confederate memory and his resistance to removing some Confederate monuments. The scar of those tensions remains. I don’t know that there is any clean way to resolve that part of Berry’s story. It’s simply one of the particulars of the life Wendell actually lived.

His letters sometimes arrived in pencil on torn sheets from a yellow legal pad. There were horses on his farm. He worked in a little writing house above the Kentucky River. People came by their house, sat at the table with he and Tanya, and stayed awhile. For all he’s been to readers far beyond Kentucky, there were still people there who simply knew him as Wendell.

I love the story of the journalist who encountered a local boy near Berry’s place and asked what it was like living beside the famous author Wendell Berry. The boy objected. Wendell Berry was not a famous author. He was his neighbor.

Berry loved that story. He told it grinning and said he’d never been paid a finer compliment.

That old, galvanized bucket still hangs on its fence post in my memory. I think I have a better understanding of why now. Long before I knew his name, I’d already lived inside what Berry tried to name: my grandparents were there, on their land, with all the people who made up that world.

Wendell Berry helped me see more clearly what had been there all along.

And I am still learning to look.

The decision to live and write in Kentucky is a traditional starting point for the Berry narrative not just because it demonstrates his localist commitments, but because many of the people we most admire show us that another way of living is possible. This is why people who have no intention of living on a farm, and who never write poetry, admire Berry so much and take such inspiration from him.

In his words and deeds, Berry strikingly demonstrated that it was possible to make choices about how we inhabit our times. Whether you want to call it modernity or postmodernity, or whether you are talking more about national or consumer culture, there are many elements of contemporary life that rub people wrong. Yet it is tempting to succumb to the inevitability narrative or to fall back on the phrase (or sentiment), “it is what it is.” Berry did not do that. He made conscious decisions about the role of technology and media in his life. He made choices about how much of the culture he wanted to accept. He was willing to seem out of step with his times. In his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” he says: “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.” One of his most famous essays is “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.”

In “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” Berry outlined guidelines for deciding on the adoption of new technology. Deciding on the adoption of new technology. Berry offered up his own way of weighing the decision:

• The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces. 
  
• It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces. 
  
• It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces. 
  
• It should use less energy than the one it replaces. 
  
• If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body. 
  
• It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools. 
  
• It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible. 
  
• It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
  
• It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

That essay was published in 1987, and Berry was already skilled in swimming against a stream of technological and economic determinism. Through his essays and through his example, Berry inspired many people to ask themselves whether or not they want a television, or a smartphone, or an AI account, or a promotion, or the newest car. It is possible to live in a way that does not compute. It is even possible to live without a computer. We may have to live differently from many people we know if we want to adopt these guidelines, but we can make that choice—as he did.

Very often we fear making choices that impose limits or come with commitments. We worry more about what we will miss out on more than we get excited about what we might gain. Berry made his home and his way of life his fixed point. He could write very particularly about place, even limiting himself to his own property. Rather than exclude him from the world, it brought the world in. People from around the globe read his words and understood something, even sometimes about themselves and their own places. Even his uncommon method of writing drew people to his work. Berry proved it’s possible to limit your geography and your way of life without being trapped. In fact, he showed it might be those who endlessly pursue new technologies and new opportunities who will find themselves trapped.

His generosity was another inspiring choice. As you read through accounts of his life and the outpourings of grief, you should notice that people loved his published writing, but he was especially beloved for his private writing—his letters. How many of the essays being written after his death include something about a letter he wrote to the author?

People wrote him letters. He wrote back. He did not need to know the person beforehand.

In Field of Dreams, the voice that Ray Kinsella has been hearing sends him to find a reclusive author named Terence Mann. Mann wrote an amazing and inspiring book in the 1960s, then stopped writing fiction and dropped out of the public eye. He lives in an apartment and rarely goes out. His work now involves computers. When Ray finds his apartment and rings the bell, Mann answers the door with “Who the hell are you?” He soon slams the door in Ray’s face. In their second exchange, Mann says: “Look, I can’t tell you the secret of life. And I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t give interviews, and I’m no longer a public figure. I just want to be left alone. So piss off.” Berry’s approach to seekers and strangers was just about the opposite.

Even before I ever knew anyone who had met Berry, I knew that you could write him a letter and he would probably write you back. I also heard that sometimes you could go visit him and sit on his porch and talk about life. At some point, I started meeting people who had those experiences. And I realized there were many, many people with those experiences. Berry demonstrated that it is possible to distance yourself from some things, but somehow remain present and available for many people.

That generosity could extend very far. One of my colleagues is well-known among the campus community for being a fan and admirer of Berry, and he assigns Berry’s writing in our honors capstone class every year. He considers it the culmination of what we’ve been doing and learning in honors, and the students see everything come together when they’re reading about Port William and the membership. Despite his deep admiration, my colleague had never written to Berry. A few years ago, some recent graduates did on his behalf. They wrote and shared about Dr. St. Antoine and what kind of teacher and person he is and how much he cares about his students and how much he loves Wendell Berry’s work and they asked him to write a letter to Dr. St. Antoine. Reader, he did. And it was kind and generous. Today that letter is framed and displayed in Dr. St. Antoine’s office. It is one of the best gifts ever received in our program.

This type of hospitality and generosity is a way of life few of us think is possible. I struggle to reply to everyone in my work inbox when those emails are from people I know. I sometimes miss office hours because I am in meetings. I have so far to go in being available to people. The gap between where I am and where I could be is based on choices I am making now and those I will make in the future.

In his politics and public positions, Berry showed that it was possible to choose to conserve and not just react. In his poem “Below,” he says, “What I stand for / is what I stand on.” He embraced his regional identity and he could celebrate his local culture, even advocating for tobacco farming and fondly remembering his forefathers. But he was conscientious in his embrace of his culture. He was not afraid to criticize those who came before him, and he was unwilling to endorse mountaintop removal mining or local economic schemes he thought were shortsighted. He was capable of shouldering complexity. He could express real despair about the state of the environment and the world and carry real hope at the same time. He chose his political positions himself rather than accepting them pre-packaged. This is probably why he, like Dolly Parton, attracted admirers who reside in many different places on the political spectrum. It’s in keeping with the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front” poem, which ends with advice to “Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection.”

Front Porch Republic is a bit like that fox. I have often described Front Porch Republic as a place where contributors share interests, but not always the same views. Some readers and writers come more from the left, others more from the right, but, basically, we’re all the kind of people who like Wendell Berry. (If you come to the conference in October, I think you will see what I mean.) It would be hard to imagine the existence of Front Porch Republic without Wendell Berry. FPR is a project that does not compute. It follows more closely the “Work for nothing” line in that “Mad Farmer Liberation Front” poem. Berry has influenced the whole project, as well as the majority of its contributors.

What creates a kinship among Berry’s admirers goes beyond his facility with language. Other people can, and did, and do, write about many of the same topics and even hold many of the same positions. Berry’s words are powerful because they are reflective of his life—his choice of life. He modeled the value of pondering the choices we make and the desirability of personal commitments. This is why people consciously making choices about life and considering what is possible can find common ground in his work, even if they make different decisions and commitments. He is a writer whose work changes lives because he chose to align his life and words. Wendell Berry is, and will remain, widely admired for writing and living that truth so well.

Now, I ought to reveal here that fiction was not a genre I had really spent all that much time reading up to that point in my life. Yes, I read the required texts from my literature classes at Tanner High School and the University of Mobile. But outside of those limited forays, I didn’t turn to fiction as a matter of course. I would have likely argued that my time was better served and my intellect was better challenged by reading works of nonfiction, especially history or philosophy or theology. But I valued the opinions and guidance of Paul and Sean. So, as the holiday season of 2000 approached, I worked out a plan. It wasn’t a complicated plan. I didn’t ask people what short story or novel was the best or their favorite. I didn’t scour Amazon for reviews. As I said, my plan wasn’t complicated. I was simply going to tackle Berry’s novels and stories in the order of their publication until I got bored. I figured that was straightforward enough. Thus, I opened up Nathan Coulter and began reading the stories of the Port William Membership.

Over the next two months or so, I devoured all the stories then available. I didn’t get bored. In fact, I remember sitting with family over Christmas reading The Memory of Old Jack through tears. By the end of February 2001, I had finished Jayber Crow and devoted myself more entirely to worrying about which graduate programs (if any) were going to give me a chance. By the end of the spring, I had not only heard from and visited some schools, but I also had decided that I would start doctoral work at the University of Kentucky in August. My study of the intersections of race and religion in colonial New England occupied most of my time until I finished my Ph.D. in early American history in 2006. That said, I do remember expectantly reading copies of That Distant Land, Hannah Coulter, and Andy Catlett during those years. I saw those excursions primarily as distractions, not realizing that my education with and from Wendell Berry was far from over.

In fact, a few years later, Wendell Berry—the actual man—stepped in and began adding his own instruction alongside the words of his I was regularly reading. Before that occurred, though, I started reading his essays shortly after taking my first tenure-track teaching position in Buffalo, New York. I nearly immediately found the same captivating prose and language. Berry’s essays challenged me in ways I never expected. Then, a year or so later, I started reading his poetry. Again, the beauty of the language overwhelmed me, introducing me to a genre that I wasn’t really certain how to interpret. Shortly after diving into his poetry, I reached out to Wendell to see if myself and two friends, Paul House and Ben Mitchell, could meet with him to discuss the theme of friendship in his various writings. He agreed, and we enthusiastically made our way to Port Royal in November 2012. From that initial visit where we discussed friendship and Berry’s use of the phrase “beloved community,” I began searching for more ways to wrestle with his ideas and to learn from him. Very graciously, he allowed me to do both—to wrestle and to learn. And he allowed me to do so both in correspondence and around his kitchen table. Distance and duties often hindered such lessons from happening as much as I would have liked. Nonetheless, though, Wendell instructed me. Sometimes by his words—spoken and written. Sometimes by pointing me toward others’ words—books he had read or was reading (such as John Lukacs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and Pete Daniel) and people whose voices he respected and cherished (such as Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Brooks Lamb). And my life is so much the better for these connections, many of which prompted other connections and friendships that led to continued learning.

When Silas House, a friend I met in part through this chain of connections Wendell helped foster, shared the news of Wendell’s passing with me, I immediately began considering some of the specific ways this monumental man changed my life over the last nearly three decades. I know that a list of such lessons will go on and on, and I look forward to it doing so. But, in light of the opportunity I have been offered here, I want briefly to share some of the initial things showing up on said list as I reflect on the life and work of Wendell Berry.

The Power of the Particular

In his 1991 essay “Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse,” Berry asserted that “Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found.” After reading this claim, I began to see the same idea in his essays beginning as early as the 1960s with some of those located in The Long-Legged House. From “Think Little” on to The Need to Be Whole, Berry stresses the power of the particular. Knowing a thing is pretty essential to caring about that thing. Or at least in deciding whether you care about that thing. A particular thing can be known and loved or not. An abstract thing cannot. In fact, abstractions of things, Berry argued, allow us to abuse the people and the world around us. By focusing on the local and on the specific, we at least conquer some of those inclinations toward abuse. Or ought to. I seek to remember this lesson in everything that I do. From how I relate to my friends and family to how I treat the sources about which I am writing as a historian to how I engage the staff at my local restaurant or bar. I am grateful for this particular lesson.

The Virtue of Hope

Another lesson I learned from Wendell is about the necessity of hope. Even after grasping his distinction between hope and optimism (and why he preferred the former), I remember using the word “optimistic” to describe myself to him on one occasion when he found Paul and I on a road near his house a few minutes before we were scheduled to stop by and spend some time with him and Tanya. As soon as I said it and he made a reply about hope, I winced. And then I starting looking for his use of the word “hope.” From as early as the essays in The Long-Legged House, Wendell consistently argued for the necessity of hope. Through his fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, then, he encouraged me to wrestle with developing a sense of hope, and to look for ways to practice hope, even when circumstances might seem less than hopeful. Being hope-filled in such moments is crucial. I am grateful for the hope of this particular lesson.

The Discipline of Peaceableness

Wendell also pretty radically helped me to rethink how I want to relate to the notion of peace. It’s one thing to proclaim “Peace be with you,” but it’s an entirely different thing to live a life of peace. A life that offers peace to everyone around you, including those with whom you share sincere and serious disagreements, doesn’t simply happen. Such a life requires discipline. Wendell regularly treated peace and peaceableness as a discipline by which we can offer hope for and to the world. Through his writings, he taught me to express the same hope and trepidation of being “devotedly enough a pacifist.” I am grateful for this particular lesson and the peace I hope it helps me pursue with those around me.

The Matter of Friends and Neighbors

When Paul, Ben, and I first went to visit with Wendell in 2012, we went to discuss the idea of friendship. Listening back to some of the audio from that meeting, I recall our lively conversation about community, friends, and neighbors. From African bushmen to biblical injunctions from Job and Paul and Jesus to intentional communities to neighbors sharing work, our conversation ranged widely. We shared laughs and asked each other probing questions as we considered the matter of friendship and what it meant to be a friend and neighbor. We discussed Wendell’s regular and provoking idea of friendship as a “long conversation.”

Following that Sunday afternoon, the three of us who traveled together to Port Royal added to our already lengthening conversation. Following that Sunday afternoon, I began a conversation with Wendell that occurred in letters and in person. He shared stories and songs and jokes. He responded to my questions and even asked questions of his own. He shared concerns and prayers about my family and my job. Following that Sunday afternoon, I also began to see the beginning of other conversations. Some of those conversations continue. Some of them have ended or at least they’ve become a little more one-sided as participants have passed. I mean, I still talk with Gurney and Ed and learn from their writings. I feel certain my conversation with Wendell will continue, as well. I know I will continue to learn from his words. I am “grateful,” like Elton Penn and Henry Catlett in Remembering, “to be in the same story” and for the particular ways he made certain I realized that friendship matters.

I believe we have lost one of our nation’s significant voices. I know quite a few of us feel the same way. I am encouraged by the fact that his daughter Mary Berry, who founded and directs The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, will continue to voice many of the concerns of her father, her uncle, and her grandfather and will speak to many of the issues they addressed. I am grateful Wendell left us so many works to visit and revisit. In the end, as I reflect on his passing, I do so with a particular hope for the peace that Wendell Berry’s legacy and life offer each of us as we strive to be the friends and neighbors this unsettled world demands.