It’s Wendell Berry’s
birthday. He was born
on August 5, 1934. WB is known as a
prolific American novelist, essayist, poet, and environmental activist. Well he is also prominent as a cultural critic, and notable as a hybrid academic-urban-farmer
with a poetic attitude towards nature. In 2012 he gave the 43rd
Jefferson Lecture (“IT
ALL TURNS ON AFFECTION”) which is perhaps the highest
award given in the humanities this side of the Noble Prize for Literature.
I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives
on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible
relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a
place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying
it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique
character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the
fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local
experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the
fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination
enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we
find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
From AWARDS & HONORS: 2012 JEFFERSON LECTURER
Wendell E. Berry Lecture “IT
ALL TURNS ON AFFECTION”
He’s
a needed voice and we can celebrate with a poem that finds comfort in the natural
world and not just its Wordswothian scenery. Describing his poetry & essays in 1978 Robert Joseph Collins wrote A
Secular Pilgrimage: Nature,
Place, and Moralilty in the Poetry of Wendell Berry.
Here is a poem that illustrates pretty much encompasses much of above and speaks a
bit of despair & comfort in troubled times:
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
From http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-peace-of-wild-things/
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