Since I last posted anything here, two of my literary heroes have passed away.
On August 31st, Wendell Berry died at his home in Kentucky. He was 92.
On September 15th, at her home in Massachusetts, Annie Dillard died. She was 81.
I feel compelled and inspired to write about these milestones here, because these two people have for over 50 years had enormous influence upon my thinking, and thus upon my path in life. First Dillard, beginning with her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I read when I was in high school, and then Berry, whose poems and essays I first encountered in a class at the University of Montana, in 1976.
In 1981 I met Wendell Berry face-to-face briefly, over breakfast at a diner in Wisconsin, and although I always hoped to meet Annie Dillard somewhere – perhaps when she was on some campus reading from her work or speaking about “the writing life” – I never did. I always intended to send her a copy of Kinds of Winter, for the simple reason that I thought she would have gotten a kick out of reading it. (Alas, you know what they say about good intentions.)
I am often struck by how much a passage, a book, a poem, an essay, or even a remark tucked into a letter or a phone call can stick with a person, deep down, and continue to adjust the trajectory of a lifetime.
It is not exaggeration to claim that the writings of these two people stand out amongst the many subtle “course corrections” that have, over time, delineated my path in life. Wendell and Annie, among many others, made some nudges to the tiller, early on, and then sporadically over the years, and those nudges have led me all the way to this place, to this morning, on the northeast end of McLeod Bay in the Northwest Territories of Canada. I am grateful.
When I think of the writings of these two masters, I come around to the phrase “take it to heart.” As in “Over time I really took to heart this idea of ________that I first encountered in a (poem, essay, novel, conversation) by (or with) so and so.” Taking an idea “to heart” is a whole lot different than simply taking an idea “to mind.”
What I respected and admired most about these two giants of thinking and writing was their honesty. Their ability to be blunt, at times comically so, and to turn a thought or a phrase into a literary two-by-four and “smack you up side de head” with it. They each wrote many lines and sentences that made me set the book down for a minute and stare off into space — perhaps murmuring something truly profound, such as “Whoa!”
Here below I share a few lines and passages and snippets of their work, lifted from the many hundreds of passages that have struck and nudged me over the years.
Thank you, Wendell and Annie. Rest in Peace.
W.B. – “The real infinitude of experience is in familiarity. My own experience has shown me that it is possible to live in and attentively study the same small place decade after decade, and find that it ceaselessly evades and exceeds comprehension. There is nothing that it can be reduced to, because “it” is always, and not predictably, changing. It is never the same two days running, and the better one pays attention the more aware one becomes of these differences. Living and working in the place day by day, one is continuously revising one’s knowledge of it, continuously being surprised by it and in error about it. {emphasis mine} And even if the place stayed the same, one would be getting older and growing in memory and experience, and would need for that reason alone to work from revision to revision.”
— from his 2000 essay “Life is a Miracle”
A.D. – “There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”
— from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974.
A.D. – “Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it. The world’s abounding objects, its rampant variety of people, its exuberant, destructive, and unguessable changes, and the splendid interest of its multiple conjunctions, appeal, attract, and engage more than ideas do, and more than beauty bare. When the arts abandon the world as their subject matter, people abandon the arts.”
— from Living by Fiction, published 1982.
W.B. – “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
– from the chapter ‘On Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience’ in “Life is a Miracle.”
A.D. – “And I thought he was foolish, this man in his seventies, who had no idea what you must do. But the fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now. As I feared it would.”
– from The Writing Life, published 1989.
And finally a poem, “Questionnaire” from Leavings: Poems. © 2010 by Wendell Berry.
1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.
4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
