Status Updates From Conversations with Wendell ...

“Doing good by conscious will is certainly necessary sometimes for some of us. But that is a grim way to live, and it increases the temptation to take credit for one’s righteousness. Mightn’t it be, if one surrenders one’s will to the will of God, that one might do a good thing will-lessly or merely willingly — because, given your commitment, the good thing is all you can do?”

“All my work comes from my loves and hopes. My essays come from a desire to understand what I love and hope for and to defend those things… my work as a fiction writer and poet… has been increasingly a source of pleasure to me—it is my way of giving thanks, maybe, for having things worthy of defense.”

“In a disintegrating, shallowly pluralistic society such as ours, the artist’s role gravitates toward a kind of nonessential entertainment, which merely distracts us from things that matter. In a truly grounded, locally adapted culture, the artists would be the rememberers. They would memorialize great occasions, preserve necessary insights and so on.”

“I think [young people are] disposed to drift around until they find a suitable community. But no community is suitable. There’s plenty wrong with them all. I could construct an airtight argument for not settling in my own community. The fact is that I’m spending my life constructing an argument for being here.”

- Wendell Berry in 1973

“Learning farming is like learning an art; it takes a long time, and a lot of careful work. And we’ve failed to teach the young people to expect that a worthy thing might be difficult to learn.”

There isn't any clear line to be drawn between ourselves and the people we love. We *are* them in a certain sense; if we weren't we wouldn't mind what happened to them.