The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

The Territory that hinterland writers have escaped to has almost always been first of all that of some metropolis or ‘center of culture.’ This is not inevitably dangerous; great cities are probably necessary to the life of the arts, and all of us who have gone to them have benefited. But once one has reached the city, other Territories open up, and some of these are dangerous. There is, first, the Territory of retribution against one’s origins. In our country, this is not just a Territory, but virtually a literary genre. From the sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, one’s old home begins to look like a ‘little raw provincial world.’ One begins to deplore ‘small town gossip’ and ‘the suffocating proprieties of small town life’ – forgetting that gossip occurs only among people who know one another and that propriety is a dead issue only among strangers. The danger is not just in the falsification, the false generalization, that necessarily attends a distant scorn or anger, but also in the loss of the subject or the vision of community life and in the very questionable exemption that scorners and avengers customarily issue to themselves. And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness.