Issue
2:2 | Review |
Jonathan Williams |
Review of Wendell Berry’s
Citizenship Papers
By Jonathan Williams
Before cogitating about Wendell
Berry's sobering new collection of essays, Citizenship Papers, I need to tell you about what I am looking at out of
the window: our meadow filled with weed at its zenith. In the hazy morning
sunshine, this is a sight to see. The
books tell us that Joe Pye was a Yankee herb doctor in Colonial times. He
is said to have made a tonic from the roots of Eupatorium purpureum
which folks used to stem diarrhea.
This bit of information somehow doesn't quite harmonize with my image
of the living plant with its great clusters of purple flowers. Here in the
mountains some of the local people also call it Queen of the Meadow.… Wendell
Berry looks at as well. It is a fine part of the countryman's life down South,
with Wendell on his farm in the grandiosely christened hamlet of Port Royal
on the Kentucky River, not far from its confluence with the Ohio.
In
order to take on Wendell's 20 essays I went into the library to check a few
sources. In Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture I found a
staggering sentence by Immanuel Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of
humanity no straight thing was ever made." That's enough to put you to bed
for a week. But, back to the office. Decided, first, to open a letter from Guy
Davenport. In it he quotes a doom-laden sentence from Marcel Proust:
"People think the love of literature, painting, and music has become
extremely wide-spread, whereas there isn't a single person who knows anything
about them." Want a little more? Berman estimates only 5,000,000 Americans
are truly "literate." Two percent of Americans buy books; two percent
listen to classical music; three percent listen to jazz. Cyberia has managed
the moronization of America in no time at all. The audience for Citizenship
Papers is maybe 5,000 readers in the
whole country.
In
the last essay in the book, Wendell Berry say that he is a man "mostly
ignorant of the things that are most important to me." He says he wrote
these essays because he was afraid.
"I write essays to see what I can find in myself with which to
answer the terrifying fact of the human destructiveness of good things. And I
write as a would-be free person, trying to fight shy of the official, the commercial,
and the fashionable." One Agrarian on a mission against the Industrial
Mind-- which is just about all of us, if we sit down and think about it.
For
me the most stringent texts are "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, "
"Two Minds," "The Prejudice Against Country People," and
"The Whole Horse." There
are many earnest and important things being said: "We cannot hope to be
secure when our government has declared, by its announced readiness 'to act
alone,' its willingness to be everybody's enemy." And: "But all our
military strength, all our police, all our technologies and strategies of
suspicion and surveillance cannot make us secure if we lose our ability to
farm, or if we squander our forests, or if we exhaust or poison our water
sources." And: "How many deaths of other people's children by bombing
or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we be free, affluent, and
(supposedly) 'at peace'." And: "If we have any sense, we forget the
fashionable determinisms, and we tell our children, 'Be good. Be careful. Mind
your manners. Be kind.'"
There
is a new secular monasticism in America. I've retreated to a woody
Meantime,
Wendell Berry has a lot to say to those who need to hear it. His stand is
surely an heroic one. There's a haiku by Basho:
Journeying through the world
To and
fro, to and fro
Cultivating a small field
