It is impossible for me to review The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. I read this collection of essays at the beginning of August and it was one of the most engaging reading experiences I have had in years. I stuck in endless scraps of paper as I read, wanting to mark down ideas to return to, quotes I wanted to keep, and passages that perfectly expressed what I thought or which I wanted more time to formulate my opposition to. Stretching from the 1960s to the 2010s, this collection shows Berry in all his forms – writer, environmentalist, Kentucky farmer, citizen – and related passions and, as usual, I find the combination of passion and commonsense irresistible. But entirely unreviewable.
Instead, I share a few of the passages that have lingered in my mind. Berry is rightly popular for his impassioned defense of the environment, of a simpler way of life, of community and of personal responsibility. Part of what made the reading experience so enjoyable, beyond the joy of encountering someone so thoughtful and articulate, was how deeply so much of what he wrote resonated. Here are a few of the excerpts that I have not been able to forget:
We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behaviour toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity – our own capacity for life – that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled. (“A Native Hill”- 1968)
As a lover of history, our obliviousness to and arrogance about our own role in it is an endless source of fascination and frustration to me, so I loved this passage:
There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of the Ohio in 1830s, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably. The probability is overwhelming that we belong to a generation that will be found by its successors to have behaved deplorably. Not to know that is, again, to be in error and to neglect essential work, and some of this work, as before, is work of the imagination. How can we imagine our situation or our history if we think we are superior to it? (“Writer and Region” – 1987)
This passage – this entire livid but humorous essay, really, which is a response to mail received after an essay about him not getting a computer and his wife continuing to type his work – was extraordinarily good. Berry is passionate about relationships and sees the strength that comes when there is trust and dependency between people, whether they be member of a community or a marriage:
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an ‘intimate’ relationship involving (Ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.
…
There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, ‘mine’ is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as ‘ours’. (“Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” – 1989)
Perhaps the quote I have most cause to pull out and share with my friends and family:
Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world. And parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible. (“Family Work” – 1980)
How better to conclude this non-review with simple instructions for how to live:
We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must want less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make. (“Word and Flesh” – 1989)
I love those quotes. I immediately placed a hold at my library.
I think this is a very you book. I didn’t always agree with everything Berry wrote but I always found it thoughtful and worth my time and consideration. I’m not sure I can say anything better of any book.
[…] The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (2017) A thought-provoking collection of essays from the 1960s to the 2010s by the noted […]