Wendell Berry

The Jefferson Lecture is always my favorite lecture of the year: there's always a great speaker, a great reception, and a great audience (which is to say, quite a few of them were my friends and acquaintances); this year the lecturer was Wendell Berry. How I feel about Wendell Berry: many of the front porchers of the world I take with a handful of salt, because I'm just not sure if what they say is consistent with how they live, but Wendell Berry I will take any day, because he's lived a life in accordance with his beliefs, which I think earns him the right to preach them. I really do admire the man. He has a wonderful, slow way of speaking, with a little bit of southern accent; he's tall and older like my grandfather.

His lecture contrasted "boomers" with "stickers." He used James B. Duke, the tobacco industrialist, to represent the boomers, and his grandfather, who lived and worked for his entire life on a small tobacco farm, as a representative sticker. Boomers develop the land at great external cost, while the stickers recognize that their destiny is tied up with the destiny of the land and so treat it carefully and protect it. James B. Duke, according to Berry, was an industrialist and a philanthropist because he first took advantage of people and then gave them charity.

Berry spoke eloquently and passionately about the way in which his land has formed him and his family: "It is not beside the point, or off my subject, to notice that these stories [about his grandfather] and their meanings, have survived because of my family’s continuing connection to its home place." And again, "Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go." That's strong stuff--I love my home town, but I wouldn't say that I'm flesh of its flesh.

My thoughts about the lecture: 1) What if we were all stickers and there were no boomers? I take his critique of the excesses of commerce and agree with him there, but there's no place at all in his theory for boomers. Rather we should all be stickers, immensely more concerned with our own land than with traveling to other places, for instance. My work is not tied up with the land (although I'm also not in any way a boomer), so what is the place for me? Also, I do really like to travel! 2) In the midst of Berry's begging us to attend to the externalities of big business, it strikes me that his own occupation, tobacco farmer, has a good number of externalities built in. Wouldn't Berry's conception of the importance of conservation require us to conserve our bodies carefully by, say, not smoking? I mean, my identity is more obviously tied up in my body than in the land.

Another great line from his talk: "In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk:  truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger." (This just stuck out to me because of my difficulties, in my dissertation, in getting words like "nature" to "keep still within definitions.")


(Previous Jefferson Lectures here and here.)