Berry 2: On Death and Imagination and Farming and Politics

"I have been here a fair amount of time, and slowly I have learned that my true home is not just this place but is also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day." --A World Lost, by Wendell Berry

Within the context of the novel, this quotation points to how the very existence of death points to the afterlife, and our closest acquaintance with the afterlife is through stories (which always fall apart and are inadequate, necessitating imagination to shore up their truth).

In A World Lost, Andy Catlett seeks the details behind his uncle's death, which happened when Andy was a child. He finds that the truth about his uncle's death exists, in part, in the stories that the town creates in order to help them make sense of his death. A friend of mine complains that Berry never has any representatives of the law and politics in his novels. In this one, however, Andy's father is a lawyer, there is a law-suit in the background (over the punishment of Andy's uncle's murderer--who is sent to jail for two years), and there are court records from the trial.

Also, on the question of whether one can be an agrarian if one isn't a farmer, I think that Andy's father provides a good insight. Andy's father was a lawyer and a farmer and all of his lawyering was connected to his love for farming: "Farming was his passion, as the law was; in his the two really were inseparable. As a lawyer, he had served mostly farmers. His love of farming and of farming people had led him into the politics of agriculture and a lifelong effort to preserve the economy of small farms."