WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?
Wendell Berry
San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990
214 pp., $19.95 paper
Wendell Berry's What Are People For? is a unified book disguised as a collection of occasional pieces: review essays of books most of which are no doubt now out of print, a consideration of "The Pleasure of Eating" and "The Work of Local Culture," and the like. There is a consideration of "The Responsibility of the Poet."
Berry's book might well be described as meditations upon abiding questions. He ponders the inescapable human condition: Fallible man must contend with his responsibilities, which requires coming to terms with his own particular, limited gifts. Our author is poet, teacher, farmer, husband, father, citizen. His acceptance of these several callings accounts for the range of his meditations. But always the singular presence: Wendell Berry, intent upon a proper homage to the things of creation.
Homage to Creation
In this light, Berry weighs the autobiography of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper, Nate Shaw. One feels in both men "the energy of passionate knowledge," which speaks through a "language under the discipline of experience, not the discipline of experience, not the discipline of ideas or rules." Berry must object, then, that Shaw's story has come to print through an editor who does not grasp his life. Even so, the sharecropper's use of names is so proximate to the things he speaks of that his words seem to touch the object as he speaks. It is Berry's gift to summon various companionable presences to us through words, even out of other's distorted words.
Almost as if speaking of himself, Berry defends Edward Abbey against Abbey's erstwhile environmentalist friends. Abbey, author of Down the River, is not "a conservationist or an environmentalist or borable ist of any other kind." He is rather a man of character, a recurrent epithet of approval for Berry. Character as possessed by Abbey means that, at his best, he is an "autobiographer," as is Nate Shaw. That is to say, Abbey is engaged, through the work of words, in a "self-defense." He is "fighting for survival, not only of nature, but of human nature, or culture, as only our heritage of works and hopes can define it. He is, in short, a traditionalist." That is the only ist Berry feels comfortable with.
"Borable ists," on the other hand, are the ends we come to when any "human product or activity that humans defend as a category becomes, by that fact, a sacred cow." Berry is defending the particularity of creation, while encouraging our recognition of finitude as necessarily orienting good human actions - our human work, which is the central rubric in Berry's book. Work is possible only in relation to this place, this thing, this person or persons, and so if it is to be good work, it must always be action respectful of concrete existences. In metaphor, for instance, the poet anchors words in finite reality commonly experienced. In "God and Country," Berry remarks that the "desecration of nature would have been impossible without the desecration of work, and vice-versa." Certainly Berry's argument has its mediators, ancient and modern. He himself recalls Henry David Thoreau and John
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