A writer is nothing without other people.
You don’t think of this when you think of them. Their kind are usually tucked away, secluded and trapped inside a room where daylight breaks in from a single window. The scene outside a distraction to what is going on inside them.
There they sit, pouring over a blank page, filling it with their musings. They do this by thinking about people they know or knew. This could be you or me. It could be the man at the supermarket paying for his coffee creamer with loose change, or maybe the woman with a beehive hairdo who parks diagonally across several spaces at the YMCA. Perhaps they’ll take the smile of a child laughing at a local park. All become characters on a stage of their making. What starts on a page quickly becomes a world writers invite readers to enter.
Justin Cox
A writer needs people like a pen needs ink. They need to be near people. They need space to be away from people, to do what they do and to make sense of what they’ve witnessed.
Sometimes a writer tells the truth. Sometimes they tell a lie. A good writer knows how to tell a story.
Wendell Berry was a good one.
He wrote with a directness brimming with sensitivity. He wrote about what he knew and what he wanted to be true. He used everything at his disposal. Verses to snare poets. He invoked essays to hook the academics. He wrote tales of the provincial Port William. Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, Andy Catlett. Characters who possessed an uncanny insight to know a world moves better at a crawl instead of at a hustling pace. Berry was bold enough to suggest our world should do the same.
And for his efforts, we admired and shunned him.
I knew a college professor who idolized Berry. He was a fellow lover of the earth and saw the sacredness in the soil. It was he who showed me how a field of peas could be a Communion table. Like any good and would-be disciple, he wanted his teacher’s approval. He sent Berry pieces he wrote. Berry got them and wrote him back. In short, the Kentuckian told him his writing “needed work.” The professor laughed and kept writing. Lesson learned.
“He was a voice shouting in the wilderness to pay attention to the wilderness.”
I often think we say things to people that we first say to ourselves — maybe good writers are the same.
Berry was labeled an agrarian, a curmudgeon and a prophet. He was a voice shouting in the wilderness to pay attention to the wilderness.
This is what Berry meant to me. He showed, through his writings, why place mattered and how you could return to it. Berry traveled. He left home, headed west. Returned to the East Coast and the lights of New York City, where he taught for a couple of years. He crossed the great pond, hung out in Italy, but by a force he tried his life to name, he returned home to the land he knew and loved. I took my own long journey away from home just to come back to the rolling hills and tobacco fields that raised me. Berry was proof you could go home again.
Long before Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, Berry shared the message that the doings of the universe don’t center around me. I was off the hook. Instead, his writings pointed me toward small acts of kindness. Plant something you’ll never see fully grown, tend a garden where you give away as much as you keep. Mow around the flowers where the bees hum and dance. Take the scraps and feed them to the worms that feed your compost.
Because of him, I’d look at a fallen tree and think of what lived there instead of hauling it away. I promise I did this instead of looking for reasons to be lazy.
“I blame him for the way I look at a plate of food.”
I blame him for the way I look at a plate of food. How far did this produce travel? How many hands helped it get to me? Did a machine or industrial means replace any? Was my roast chicken treated and dispatched with respect? How did a life come to an end so that mine would find nourishment?
Berry helped me see I could care for others through food. A jar of apple butter said what I couldn’t to a grieving family. I’d attach a note anyway, saying why I made it and which orchard the fruit came from. Only God knows if they kept the note, but they returned the empty jar.
He showed me how to slow down, to chew my food, not so I wouldn’t choke but so the conversation at the table I’d been invited to would last longer.
He helped hone my ability to pay attention. He trained my eyes to spot the first lightning bug in the summer. He made me aware of the water levels in the creeks and which animals lived there. He helped me understand the land I live on has a history and that being on it, you become part of that history.
And he forced me to reckon time and time again with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke’s Gospel asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Surely not the sumbitch at the end of the road with that flag out front? Not him! Yeah, Wendell Berry meant him too. Community means everyone, or it means nothing. All have to belong.
Berry, like many prophets, had a problem with big steeples. Those institutions that draw a line of what is holy and what isn’t. His gift was somehow making the ordinary feel sacramental. An hour by a pond was as good as standing in Notre Dame. The sound of cicadas a match for any choir. The wood drake whistle on par with the finest preacher’s proclamation.
His church was filled with wild things, and he was at peace with that. I hope I will be too when my time comes.
I hope I will have cared for some small corner of God’s creation with the same kind of stubborn attention. I hope I will have noticed things others hurried past. I hope I have a lot of meals with my neighbors.
I hope, like Berry, to leave this place a little better, a little more beautiful and a little more wild because I was here.
And I hope, along the way, I’ll not forget to write about it.
Justin Cox received his theological education from Campbell University and Wake Forest University School of Divinity and McAfee School of Theology, where he received his doctor of ministry. He is an ordained minister holding standing in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and American Baptist Churches USA. When not spending time with his spouse and daughters, he can be found writing and baking late into the night. His thoughts and reflections are his own.
Related:
On the life and death of Wendell Berry | Opinion by Kristen Drumgoole