Wendell Berry died last week at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he farmed his land using traditional techniques and wrote with pencil and paper in a cabin lacking electricity.
Berry was celebrated for his polemics against industrial agriculture and his elegiac tributes to family farms and small-town living. But for those with no direct connection to food production or ability to move to a rural enclave, Berry’s example points toward a broader lesson: the great satisfactions of living one’s life on purpose.
As a young man, Berry set out on a path toward an elite academic career. Soon after earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Kentucky, he headed to Stanford to study creative writing, followed by a stint in Italy and France (funded by a Guggenheim fellowship). He later took a professorship at New York University’s Heights campus in the Bronx. Along the way, he got married and had two kids.
This was the situation he found himself in when, in 1964, at the age of 29, Berry made a radical decision: He would quit his job to move back to Henry County, Kentucky, where his family had lived and farmed for many generations.
Here’s how the writer David Demaree summarized what happened next:
The day he formally announced his resignation, Berry’s supervisor called him into his office. The senior faculty member must have assumed that the young Berry—not yet thirty—simply did not grasp what he was throwing away. It was one last appeal from the world he was leaving behind, to not throw away the extraordinary success before him for the obscurity—and fidelity—of Kentucky. His choice, according to Berry, amounted to ‘intellectual death; cut off from the cultural springs of the metropolis’ in the eyes of the literary world. His supervisor invoked Thomas Wolfe’s famous line, warning Berry that “you can’t go home again.” The meeting did not move Berry; his face was set like flint toward Kentucky.
Berry was driven by conviction. He wanted to write about the importance of “people and place,” and didn’t think he could do it accurately from afar.
“The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky,” he told the Times in a 2018 interview. “I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”
We live in a world increasingly defined by numbness and conveniences, largely mediated through digital technology. We use tools like AI to escape the slightest hint of cognitive strain and cue up algorithmically-masticated slop on our phones to quiet our anxious minds. Our office jobs have devolved into a Kabuki theater exercise of Slacks about emails about Zoom meetings, to be auto-transcribed and transformed into a PowerPoint that no one will read. Politics has been reduced to a childish Manichaeism that encourages us to cosplay as radicals from the safe remove of social media.
Berry understood these types of temptations. But he also realized that hardness and strain are not enemies to evade. When oriented toward an intentional vision of your life, these same challenges can yield a foundation that can withstand the inevitable storms of human existence.
In his stubborn insistence on a simple life, laser-focused on what mattered to him, Berry rejected the entire digital edifice of our 21st-century culture that increasingly constrains our lives. The lesson to take away from Berry’s 92 years is the grand possibility of rebuilding your life into something deeper.
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More on Wendell Berry
- This piece from Front Porch Republic, which I quoted above, provides a great account of Berry’s decision to embrace depth.
- Berry’s obituary in the New York Times also includes rich details.
- Dorothy Wickenden’s 2022 New Yorker profile of Berry is a classic.
- You might also like this short essay I wrote about the riverside cabin where Berry wrote.
