Down to Earth

...And art we want it to be instantaneous and effortless...

...Our linear, progressive desires are imposed upon a natural world governed by the cyclical patterns of birth and death...

...A few years back he left an uprooted life and returned to his native Kentucky to farm, to teach at the state university and to write...

...A Southerner...

...Berry remains committed to tangible realities...

...Berry is presenting an actual human existence, something more than a mere persona, and he insists that we take him literally as well as seriously...

...Berry's vision is an ecological one in the broadest sense of the term...

...Yet Berry's nature is no abstract spiritual or pantheistic force: It speaks through such concrete and commonplace manifestations as the change of seasons and the growth of things...

...author, "The Party of Eros" Coming off our fascination with the "new," we are looking anxiously for someone to whose voice we can attend...

...The economy, he notes, debases the land and bleeds its resources dry, while neglecting proper cultivation and necessary replenishment...

...We have had our fill of intellectuals who masquerade as celebrities, of radicals who act like clowns, of liberals who send their children to private schools, and of poets who get $1,500 to read four poems and insult their audiences...

...In an essay on William Carlos Williams he offers as his subject: "No ideas but in things...

...Instead, the letdown has come from the cultural and political vanguard, which has not stayed around long enough to see any issue through...

...This identity of role and essence is not achieved by a series of perpetual peak experiences or the total and immediate satisfaction of desires...

...For Berry, nature defines what men are and how they should conduct their fives...

...The image conjured up by this description of the author is likely to make a modern reader a bit uneasy...

...Berry's intention is to show us an alternative way of living and to suggest its implications in the light of our historical and contemporary problems...

...Both activities demand a willingness to control oneself, to abide by the appropriate means as well as the desired ends...

...Underlying and informing these ideas is his touchstone, the natural order...

...An advocate of the virtues of rural existence...

...Unlike so many disillusioned persons, his retreat to the woods was not simply to discover how the other half (in fact, only 25 per cent) fives...

...His intense involvement with place, with reestablishing a harmony of man and nature, and his objection to abstract rationality link Berry to some of the more promising strains in the counterculture...

...Perhaps the most unique sense Berry conveys is that of being a truly unalienated man...

...The conservatives have not disappointed us, since they never promised anything...

...He believes in the importance of learning once again to "think little," and abandoning our Promethean tendencies, our lust for organizational solutions...

...And his plea that we should be as concerned with producing good farmers as we are with producing good crops may seem only a writer's turn of phrase, until we read his indictment of the corporate farm-industry and the steady artificialization of farm production...

...We want our art to support the illusion that high achievement is within easy reach, for we want to believe that, though we are demeaned by our work and driven half crazy by our pleasure, we are all mute inglorious Miltons...

...Thus, the themes in this book, as in Berry's other writings, are the necessity of roots and a sense of obligation to self, to others and to the habitat...

...Despite his physical removal from the city environment, he has not assumed a cranky posture above the daily issues...

...His life is genuinely there, away from the metropolis, and after visiting the "real world" from time to time, he returns gratefully to his place...

...Reviewed by Richard H. King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College...

...The proper goal is not a naked innocence that lacks a past and is heedless of the future, but a knowledgeable and quiet husbandry of the self, the community, tradition, and the natural world around us...

...Berry, who is also the author of a couple of novels and several volumes of poetry, has produced an oeuvre that establishes him as a writer worthy of our consideration...

...In short, Thoreau is much more of a model for him than Allen Tate or Robert Penn Warren...

...He has written eloquently against the Vietnam War and actively protested the desecration of the Appalachians by the strip-miners...

...In an essay entitled "The Regional Motive," Berry distances himself from the sentimental chauvinism of the "cult of the South" that revels in the tragic Southern past while refusing to work for the "establishment of n decent and preserving community" in the present...

...Amid this din, Wendell Berry has gone about his business quietly and steadily...

...Nor does it involve the disappearance of the individual into some mystical whole, an annihilation of the mind for the sake of pure being...

...We even treat one another as expendable commodities much as the white man historically treated the Indians and the black sextracting what we think we need, and then moving on to someone else...

...Both are seriously distorted at present, and that is why he does what he does and writes what he writes...

...Ultimately, Berry is saying, the manner in which we farm and the quality of our culture are intimately related...

...Existing with as well as in the world, learning its rhythms, its blessings, its demands, people can discover what is required of them...

...We want to have love without a return of devotion or loyalty...

...Of the Regionalists who authored I'll Take My Stand in 1930 he writes in his quietly caustic manner: "I suspect that their withdrawal was facilitated by a tendency to love the land, not for its life, but for its historical associations . . . [they believed] that history makes the grass green whether the land is well farmed or not...

...We race over and through our physical and moral landscape...

...if he protests against the crassness of much of our life, he refuses to locate its origin north of the Mason-Dixon line...

...The common thread in all of this is Berry's firm conviction that personal witness to a belief must assume priority over its public declamation...

...The requirements of farming and the craft of writing have taught him an important lesson: Nothing of value comes without patience and discipline...

...But I doubt he would contend that the urban ethos is peculiarly corrupting and alienating...

...And he does so without lapsing into flaccid homilies and smug self-content...

...A Continuous Harmony is his fourth collection of essays...

...Berry might easily be mistaken for a latter-day Agrarian, a conservative gentleman farmer-poet railing against Yankee commercialism and hearkening back nostalgically to antebellum times...

...Our nomadism of the flesh and spirit is killing us...

...Berry may be considered a Utopian for returning to the land, until we remember that our urban areas are absurdly over-populated and our small towns and farms are dying...

...In his lengthy essay "Discipline and Hope," Berry captures the mere triciousness that is common to much of our contemporary culture, be it "straight" or "counter": "We will have no prophet who is not an acrobat...

...The subtitle of this collection reminds us that the idea of culture originally took the cultivation of the earth as its model...

...we want it to involve no apprenticeship to a tradition or a discipline or a master, no devotion to an ideal of workmanship...