Ah, Wendell Berry. The last time I attempted to read him, I, um, didn’t succeed. But then, I wasn’t getting much sleep either. And one thing I’ve learned about Berry is that you really have to focus on what he’s saying. I re-realized that with this book; I found I got the most out of the essays when it was quiet.

So, about the essays — the book is a collection of some of Berry’s essays on from the last thirty years, though I think the most recent was written in 1999. They touch on typical Berry subjects: the environment, place, community, conservation, farming. It wasn’t as extremist as I remember being Sex, Freedom, Economy & Community being (though there are several essays from that book here), but there was still food for thought.

And, as an interesting aside, I felt less guilty than usual while reading this book. I guess I have to back up a bit here: Berry makes me feel guilty. I guess it’s because I actually am persuaded by many of his arguments, and feel bad that I’m not doing more in my life. And since we’ve actually started making changes in our lives (read hubby’s post about that here) to conserve and to treat the world we live in better, I was able to read this book without the huge dose of guilt that has come along with reading Berry in the past.

Some other thoughts. I loved the first essay: “A Native Hill”. They called it a geobiography, and it was just beautifully written. Berry is such an evocative writer.

Perhaps it is to prepare to hear someday the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all. Nature has a patient ear. To her the slowest funeral march sounds like a jig. She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months. Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of a flower.

There is one essay that hurt (I really can’t think of how else to put it). I was having a really bad day, as a mother, and I sat down to read “The Body and the Earth” and I got to a section entitled “Sexual Division”. And I read this:

This determinations that nurturing should become exclusively a concern of women served to signify to both sexes that neither nurture nor womanhood was very important. But the assignment to woman of a kind of work that was thought both onerous and trivial was the beginning of their exploitation… Women had become customers, a fact not long wasted on the salesmen, who saw that in these women they had customers of a new and most promising kind. The modern housewife was isolated from her husband, from her school-age children, and from other women. She was saddled with work from which much of the skill, hence much of the dignity, had been withdrawn, and which she herself was less and less able to consider important.

That’s exactly how I was feeling. Isolated. Like my life was a drudgery. It was emotional to see my feelings there on the page.

It was a good read. It is good to be reminded that nature is there and it is good, and an integral part of our lives, whether or not we live on a farm. That the real things in life: community, the growing season, nature, are what really matter. That technology and business isn’t the total sum of existence (and in fact, it just might do more harm than good). And if it takes an old crank from Kentucky to remind us of that, so be it.