The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It was a great pleasure to read Wendell Berry’s elegant essays and compassionate, informed ideas.
Because he wrote them over the course of 50 years, it is perhaps inevitable that some of his ideas come across as old-fashioned. The ones about why he’ll never buy a computer and some of his ideas on feminism spring to mind. But even those have points of merit and are expressed so beautifully they’re worth reading for the language alone.
For example, on not buying a computer, he points to the physicality of the act of writing and the link between the physical body and the written word, and to the way handwritten pages have a past (corrections, erasures, etc) and a future (the ultimate form the piece may take), while text on a computer screen is nothing but light and is gone forever when replaced.
On feminism, he makes the not-invalid observation that it is unfair to exclude women from the workplace (we’re talking a long-ago version of feminism, here), but that if men in the workplace are helpless wage-slaves and vandals of the Earth, then all we are achieving is to admit more people into wage-slavery and vandalism.
He makes lots of philosophical observations and arguments, often from points of view I hadn’t considered before. In this way he challenged some of my assumptions and beliefs, helping me see new sides of arguments previously settled in my mind, and new dimensions and effects of systems. In many cases, I had questioned the underlying systems, but not from his angles.
Frequently, I had a sense that what Berry posited was true, but incomplete. This sense was contextualized against the knowledge that everyone’s truths are incomplete, yet are no less true because of it. The great thing about Berry’s truths is that they are ones I rarely (or never) hear, and are perhaps not spoken or acknowledged often enough. Even the ones I disagreed with caused me to regard my own truths with a different, perhaps mitigated confidence.
This is a book I’ll buy in printed copy because many of the essays are worth revisiting.
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B. Warren Brown 