I met Wendell Berry in 2004 when he was visiting Pittsburgh to perform a reading for the International Poetry Forum, and my wife Eva and I had dinner with him and his daughter Mary. They were on their way to an agricultural convention in Michigan where Wendell had agreed to deliver a lecture about top soil. He was, as you would expect, quiet, modest, authentic and justifiably proud of Mary who with her husband had founded a vineyard in Kentucky a few years before. I unabashedly took the opportunity to pitch Wendell on the prospect of publishing a book with Autumn House Press, which I was running at the time. He thanked me, but shook his head, saying that he had a close relationship with his longtime editor Jack Shoemaker whom Wendell loved working with because the editor never bothered him with talk about book sales, instead letting Wendell follow his own path, writing poetry, novels, essays… whatever pressed him at the time.
We talked briefly about the Iraq War which had begun the year before and was growing like a cancer. Wendell shook his head in disgust at the wasteful stupidity of it all. Looking back on our brief time together, I realize that in one conversation, many of the seemingly disparate strands of Wendell’s life and character were woven. He held a deep commitment to his family, to farming, to writing poetry and prose, and to teaching people about the environment. He was not particularly interested in book sales, but he was fiercely loyal to his friends in the literary community. And when all else failed, he was a passionate political activist. He protested the Vietnam War, saying in 1968 that “peace is more important than victory.” Wendell despised nuclear power and was arrested in 1979 for trespassing at the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant in Indiana.
Later, he said of that day: “People asked if I wanted to be arrested and I said, ‘Hell No’ but I was willing to be.” Wendell professed to be a Christian, but his faith held elements of a much older path, one in which elements of water, soil and the spirits of animals show us the way to peace and acceptance. As he wrote:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
