By LeRoy Lawson
Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005).
Sometimes when life gets too complicated you just need to sit a spell with somebody who doesn”t need to keep up, who looks askance at modern society”s frenetic pace and, drawing a grateful breath of unpolluted air, simply can”t be bothered trying to be cool.
That someone is Wendell Berry. This Kentucky gentleman farmer/poet/philosopher and author of more than 30 books is a hayseed”s hayseed. His fictional Port William, Kentucky, like William Faulkner”s fictional Yoknapatawpha County and Garrison Keillor”s fictional Lake Wobegon, reminds me so much of my for-real Tillamook County in Oregon that I feel, when reading him, I am back home again””back where people have roots and whose quiet, unrecorded acts of kindness and of love you can take for granted.
Where I come from people aren”t much impressed with the size of your bank account or the model of your latest car; they do pay attention, though, to the beatings of your heart. And when I am in search of sage advice seasoned by many harvests, I seldom ask my learned PhD friends. I want to know what the farmers and fishermen back home think. They can read the clouds and the tide tables and they aren”t stampeded by the latest news from Washington or Wall Street””or Hollywood.
STARTING SMALL
Wendell Berry could be from Tillamook. The title of The Way of Ignorance tells you here”s a man who knows some things, but more importantly, is not ashamed to admit the things he doesn”t know. He writes intelligently about selected big subjects like ecology, technology, the economy, and God. But to be knowledgeable is not necessarily to aspire to omniscience. He leaves that accomplishment to God. Berry”s wisdom is worth listening to, and his ignorance is refreshing.
In this book of essays, even when he writes about big subjects he starts small, like this:
We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt for small places and small streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they are understood collectively as large destructions. Excessive nutrient runoff from farms and animal factories in the Mississippi watershed has caused, in the Gulf of Mexico, a hypoxic or “dead zone” of five or six thousand square miles. In forty-odd years, strip mining in the Appalachian coal fields, culminating in mountain removal, has gone far toward the destruction of a whole region, with untold damage to the region”s people, to watersheds, and to the waters downstream.
Tillamook dairy farmers know what Berry”s talking about. If you”d let my friend George take you on one of his famous tours of the county, the first stop would be to view (and, depending on the direction of the wind, smell) what he assures us is the world”s largest liquid tank. In dairy country, you see, the cows produce more than milk. Their liquid and solid nonmilk products used to be spread over the lush fields whenever it was convenient for the farmers. But they have learned what Berry is complaining about.
So now these ecologically savvy farmers store the waste (which really is valuable fertilizer) in vast open-air vats until the dry season, when Tillamook”s heavy rains won”t wash it into the rivers that empty into the ocean. It may seem a little thing, what the cow does. But it matters big time.
And about God? Berry”s is a God to be revered, not to be cuddled up to or fooled around with. For example, he wonders how we can reconcile the teachings of One who insisted we love our enemies and bless those who curse us with our recent behavior in the Middle East. He also ponders whether Christians would be willing to obey Jesus” commandments if we actually comprehended just how painful such obedience would be.
Like my outspoken Tillamook farmer friends, Berry can make you a mite uncomfortable when he gets around to politics, too. He”s pretty hard on conservatives who bundle politics and religion in the same party (if you were really religious, you know, you”d belong to my church and my party!). But then, on the other hand, he”s not so gentle with liberals who dismiss all conservatives as ignoramuses, either. A fair-minded man, this Berry, even if not always easy to listen to.
PRESERVING COMMUNITY
He understands what it takes to preserve community life in an age of individualism.
“Every man for himself” is a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning nightclub, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of caretaking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that cannot be privatized.
Put that bite together with this one: “We have to extend . . . pity to those who are sure that “˜it takes a village to raise a child” but who forget that it takes a local culture and local economy to raise a village.” He speaks truth, does Mr. Berry.
He takes his title for this collection of essays from T. S. Eliot”s “East Coker.”
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
Berry”s whole body of writing teaches, if you are humble enough to look and listen, an ignorance that is the pathway to understanding.
If you prefer your philosophy in storytelling doses, then dip into his novels. You might start with Nathan Coulter and Jayber Crow, where you”ll meet some people very much like the people in my home county. I think you”ll enjoy their company. My favorite, however, is Hannah Coulter. She”s worth getting acquainted with. Her book is pretty much in the style my grandmother might have adopted, if she had taken a pen in hand.
LeRoy Lawson, international consultant with Christian Missionary Fellowship International, is a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and a member of Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee. His column appears at least monthly.
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