A Voice of Common Sense
We have a tendency to throw around the term “Once in a lifetime opportunity” rather freely. Everything from amusement park visits to furniture sales are touted as ONCE IN A LIFETIME EVENTS YOU CAN’T MISS!!! Well, on Thursday night, Michelle and I had an honest-to-goodness once-in-a-lifetime experience. We met Wendell Berry at a book signing and heard him read his work.
Wendell Berry is one of my heroes. I’d put him the list of five most important living writers. He wrote about the health of the land and environmental sustainability long before it was in vogue to do so. The man has got it figured out. Reading him makes me want to plant a garden, make my community a better place, spend more quality time with my family, and SAVE THE WORLD! Somehow, this crotchety old 75-year-old Kentucky-farmer-turned-Stanford-trained-scholar-turned-Kentucky-farmer-again manages to fire me up about doing right and doing good by the environment and each other. And not just me - the crowd at the reading was a delightful mixture of ponytailed hippies and Mormon housewives.
After standing in line for an hour to get our 10 seconds with the author,
we headed over to the Masonic Temple auditorium for the reading. He read from an essay he’s writing about the economy, and he finished with a short story he wrote last year about falling off a barn roof. (We were all in stitches, especially my date.)
The best part was his extemporaneous responses to people’s questions. What I’ll remember is his emphasis of contributing to the place where we’re rooted. He expressed incredulity that people don’t know the native plants and names of streams in their area, and said he would remodel the higher education system to not only teach upward mobility, but also homecoming - going back to where you came from and contributing there.
For interested parties, I offer three introductions to Wendell Berry:
Wendell Berry is one of my heroes. I’d put him the list of five most important living writers. He wrote about the health of the land and environmental sustainability long before it was in vogue to do so. The man has got it figured out. Reading him makes me want to plant a garden, make my community a better place, spend more quality time with my family, and SAVE THE WORLD! Somehow, this crotchety old 75-year-old Kentucky-farmer-turned-Stanford-trained-scholar-turned-Kentucky-farmer-again manages to fire me up about doing right and doing good by the environment and each other. And not just me - the crowd at the reading was a delightful mixture of ponytailed hippies and Mormon housewives.
After standing in line for an hour to get our 10 seconds with the author,
we headed over to the Masonic Temple auditorium for the reading. He read from an essay he’s writing about the economy, and he finished with a short story he wrote last year about falling off a barn roof. (We were all in stitches, especially my date.)
The best part was his extemporaneous responses to people’s questions. What I’ll remember is his emphasis of contributing to the place where we’re rooted. He expressed incredulity that people don’t know the native plants and names of streams in their area, and said he would remodel the higher education system to not only teach upward mobility, but also homecoming - going back to where you came from and contributing there.
For interested parties, I offer three introductions to Wendell Berry:
- A quote about fidelity, which enriches my understanding of marriage:
"Another use of fidelity is to preserve the possibility of devotion against the distractions of novelty. What marriage offers - and what fidelity is meant to protect - is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments, which give us the highest joy we can know: that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense at-one-ment)."
- An essay about technology (my apologies for the wretched formatting).
- A book recommendation: The Art of the Commonplace, though What Are People For? or Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community are fine choices as well.
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