The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

I am supposing, then, that Huckleberry Finn fails in failing to imagine a responsible, adult community life. And I am supposing further that this is the failure of Mark Twain’s life, and of our life, so far, as a society. Community life, as I suggested earlier, is tragic, and it is so because it involves unremittingly the need to survive mortality, partiality, and evil. Because Huck Finn and Mark Twain so clung to boyhood, and to the boy’s vision of free bachelorhood, neither could enter community life as I am attempting to understand it. A boy can experience grief and horror, but he cannot experience that fulfillment and catharsis of grief, fear, and pity that we call tragedy and still remain a boy. Nor can he experience tragedy in solitude or as a stranger, for tragedy is experienceable only in the context of a beloved community.