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Book Review: How It Went
As I read Wendell Berry’s latest collection of short stories How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership, I thought often of a passage from his Memory of Old Jack.…
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Wendell Berry on science worship
Listening to our leaders reassuring us that all public health and political action is being directed by science and expert advice reminds me of this passage from Wendell Berry’s “Letter to a Scientific…
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The Art of Loading Brush
The few reviews I’ve seen for this latest collection by Wendell Berry make reference to its repetition of his “usual themes.” But I felt a sadness as I read. A combination of essays,…
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Loading brush, and taking the measure
Andy is forced to question the worth of the advocacy that has so occupied him and his friends for so long. He knows that their advocacy has virtually no standing with professors, intellectuals,…
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Our Only World
When readers of Wendell Berry see that he has a new book coming out, we tend to read it on reflex. The themes are seldom new; that’s part of the appeal. We read…
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Why bother?
“When we reflect that ‘sentence’ means, literally, ‘a way of thinking’ (Latin: sententia) and that it comes from the Latin sentire, to feel, we realize that the concepts of sentence and sentence structure…
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A Place in Time
These stories went straight to my heart. I’ve been a Berry-reader since the mid-nineties and have read everything he’s written, but not since my first reading experience (The Memory of Old Jack) have…
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Camaraderie and Comfort
Terrors are to come. The earth is poisoned with narrow lives. I think of you. What you will live through, or perish by, eats at my heart. What have I done? I need…
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Jayber Crow
I read Jayber Crow when it first came out, and I didn’t like it as much as I expected to. Over the last week I’ve reread it, and I liked it better this…
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Praying with Jayber
I’ve been rereading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. I’m bearing down on the end, but I wanted to quote this passage here (though it’s long) because it seems important and is indisputably beautiful. It…
