Praise for The Art of Loading Brush
Finalist for the 2018 Southern Book Prize
“In Berry’s new book, The Art of Loading Brush, he is a frustrated advocate, speaking out against local wastefulness and distant idealism; he is a gentle friend, asserting as he always has, the hope possible in caring for the world, and your specific place in it . . . The Art of Loading Brush is singular in Berry’s corpus.”
—The Paris Review
“The cumulative force of these lyrical essays takes the reader’s breath away, as if we have relearned something essential that contradicts the world all around us . . . Here is a man deeply rooted, wisely aware, offering a manifesto of weighty moral passion. He exposes the counterfeit quality of our dominant life and summons us to know and live differently.”
—The Christian Century
“Berry has faithfully cultivated his given life within the limits of his marginal place in rural Kentucky, and . . . in the essays, stories, and single poem collected in his latest book, he distills his life’s varied work into a coherent sense. And like Kentucky bourbon, it is a complex, mature sense, flavored by the fields and forests of his place.”
—Englewood Review of Books
also by wendell berry
Another Turn of the Crank
The Art of the Commonplace
Citizenship Papers
A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Hidden Wound
Home Economics
Life Is a Miracle
The Long-Legged House
The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
Recollected Essays: 1965–1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
Standing by Words
The Unforeseen Wilderness
The Unsettling of America
The Way of Ignorance
What Are People For?
The Art of Loading Brush
Copyright © 2017 by Wendell Berry
First paperback edition: 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used imaginatively.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Names: Berry, Wendell, 1934– author.
Title: The art of loading brush : new agrarian writings / Wendell Berry.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034645 | ISBN 9781619020382 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture—United States. | Agriculture—Social aspects—United States.
Classification: LCC S441 .B46 2017 | DDC 338.10973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034645
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-158-0
Cover design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Tabitha Lahr
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is indebted, as most of my books have been, to my conversation with my brother, John Marshall Berry, Jr. That conversation began in earnest half a century ago and ended just a few days before he died on October 27, 2016.
Our conversation remained from beginning to end under the influence of our father, of his devotion to farming, of his work in behalf of the small farmers of our region, and of our conversation with him.
That conversation was taken up many years ago between Tanya Berry and me. It continues between us and our children and their children.
This is the conversation of agrarians and agrarianism, far larger, older, and longer than our family or any family can remember, involving some people we know, and many we don’t know.
I dedicate this book to that conversation and to all of its members, once, now, and to come.
You had to be here then to be able to don’t see it and don’t hear it now. But I was here then, and I don’t see it now . . .
—Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men
. . . our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life . . .
—C. S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” Selected Literary Essays
My view is that all artists, whether they know it or not, whether they would repudiate the notion or not, are in fact “showers forth” of things which tend to be impoverished, or misconceived, or altogether lost or willfully set aside in the preoccupations of our present intense technological phase, but which, none the less, belong to man.
So that when asked to what end does my work proceed I can do no more than answer . . . thus: Perhaps it is in the maintenance of some sort of single plank in some sort of bridge.
—David Jones, The Dying Gaul
We are responsible for what we remember.
—John Lukacs, talking with students at the University of Louisville, March 9, 2011
Contents
Preface by Maurice Telleen ∫ 3
Introduction ∫ 5
The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age ∫ 19
Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend ∫ 57
The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation ∫ 103
The Order of Loving Care ∫ 179
A Long Ancestry ∫ 217
The Branch Way of Doing ∫ 227
The Art of Loading Brush ∫ 237
Epilogue: What Passes, What Remains (from Sabbaths 2016—VIII) ∫ 259
Preface*
by Maurice Telleen (in absentia)
Whatever agrarianism is, it is too important to be a mere movement.
・・・
Movements, almost by definition,