Remnants

We're all elders now.

"And now he thinks the time is coming when this faltering civilization, like many others, will have to decide: Are the few surviving of Jefferson's "small land holders," in their ancient lineage of need and knowledge, a romantic fiction, as most of us now think, or a 'saving remnant' necessary to renew the human life of the earth?"

WB, "A Long Ancestry" in The Art of Loading Brush

We Americans are learning so much these days and every lesson is horrible. We didn't know the separation of powers was thin as paper; that the rule of law wasn't a rule after all; that government "of the people, by the people and for the people" could not only perish from the earth, but could be gone before this year's foliage.

Some of us who have never known real despair are beginning to learn what it feels like. Some are beginning to understand that our job is to fight it off. Some of us have people to walk with -- people who know how to keep despair at bay. If you don't, finding that person might be the first and most important thing to do.

America is turning. Toward what, we don't know, but it will never be the same. What happens in 2025 is going to be as consequential as anything we'll ever live through. But, historic as this moment is, I'm not trying to write about it. Instead I want to describe how we might carry ourselves as outsiders to the catastrophe unfolding in Washington DC. And to do that, as always, I want to keep sharing about the stalwart patriotism of Wendell Berry, an outsider to the end. An old man now, he continues to give voice to the disenfranchised and dismissed. The fight is personal for him, and fairly recently, he gave us a most personal book -- one that seeps with wisdom that comes with the passing of years and of friends.

A figure as large as Wendell Berry's will always buck the confines of a short blog, but my foolishness is equally stubborn. I have to keep writing about him. Never before have we needed his example so much. Never again will we see another like him.

***

If you don't really know Wendell Berry, all you need to know is that he was born and raised, like his forebears, in a rural northern Kentucky county and he's still there, 90 years later. As a young professional, he decided, against everyone's better judgement, to return home to a life of writing and smallholder farming. He had prodigious talent and the choices that come with it. He lived for a short time in Italy as a Guggenheim Fellow, taught at NYU and studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford. But he missed Henry County and the agrarian ways of his boyhood. For 60 years he's been walking his land, farming, writing and advocating for a nature-based land use ethic that industrialism has made irrelevant but which inspired generations of environmentalists. An avowed Christian, he has no patience with big institutions like church, government, and university, which he believes have each failed to enact their foundational purpose and worse, collude in the desecration of nature. He manages to be both liberal and conservative, and also neither.

The hardships that could be ahead for us, that we are frightened about, are many of the same things that Wendell and rural Americans have already suffered -- a way of life not just lost, but taken. Six weeks into this presidency, we should all be worried about losing agency and opportunity to a reckless regime beholden only to profits and political favor. It behooves us to know how this happens, and how others have dealt with it and carried on. As valuable as he is for causes like clean water and healthy soil, Wendell Berry is also a much-needed witness to what's happened "out there" in the America where few of us live and even fewer understand.

The Henry County of Wendell's youth was not idyllic but it was intact. Young people had everything they needed to learn their way into adulthood -- older people to teach and protect them, jobs that supported a local economy that their families relied on, school not too far away, woods and creeks to explore, and stories to know themselves and their inheritance by. But after World War Two, remote, rural towns began a decline which hasn't stopped yet. Industrialized agriculture, enabled by "expand or perish" federal policies, killed small farms everywhere, insecticide-like, also taking down the people, businesses, nature and cultures that supported the farmers and were supported by them.

In the timespan we're talking about, a whole tide of people left these places and only a few trickled in. Most weren't grateful to leave. They left because they were forsaken by free markets, elected leaders and corporatized agriculture. Earning a decent income, raising healthy children, getting out of debt and imagining a better future became impossible.

This decline has been the subject of Wendell's writing for more than a half century. His fiction is about the place he once knew and still loves, but his essays are a piercing and unassailable account of what happens when communities are left to fend for themselves against dictatorial forces. It's devastating.

Farmers died without heirs, almost by rule. No place of business that closed ever opened again. Old houses in the town, on farms, on places that once were farmed, were neglected, abandoned, demolished or burned. Young people went away and returned only for funerals. Or they commuted to work and returned only to watch television and sleep. The sitting places in front of the stores that were almost never deserted in the old days...came finally to be empty all night long, even on Saturday night, even in the best weather. The old sounds of the early morning, roosters crowing, men calling their milk cows, had been replaced by the starting of tractors and commuters' cars and pickup trucks, and by the passing of school buses carrying the school children away from early morning to late evening. A new kind of time had come, a new kind of history. Now when one of the old ones died, there would be something the survivors would want to know that could no longer be known. Or there would be something they did not have that they would have to go farther to get, or would never find again anywhere.

Those last sentences are the most tragic. This isn't just a story of a place changing, or evolving into something else. This is the obituary of history itself, if history is the handed-down stories and knowledge of how people pass through time together. This is what's happening to all of us now under Trump 2.0: threads are being cut and we are rent from what we always knew, from who we thought we were. Bill McKibben wrote this week that agencies like NOAA that are being trashed, won't be rebuilt. Centuries of institutional knowledge will be forgotten and for what? How do we process the wreckage of our federal government? I'm angry and activated, but also disillusioned and bereft.

Because no public figure has taken up lost causes as assiduously as Wendell Berry, he has often been asked about hope. Usually he quotes the gospel of Matthew: "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." I've always taken him to mean "just do the work." And while that's the right frame, it leaves us to wonder how it feels to be Wendell Berry -- a modern-day Noah whose prophesies have been heeded by no one at all. Imagine dedicating your whole life to one idea and looking back to see that idea taking root....nowhere.

As a young man and well into his 70s, Wendell traveled far and wide to find examples of his ideas at work -- farm communities where the people, animals and land were all made healthier by agrarian practices; forests that were harvested sustainably for more than a hundred years; horse and sheep breeders whose stock didn't require copious inputs of drugs and chemically raised grains. Slowly he found the proof it could be done, along with a maverick crew of like-minded free-thinkers who were doing it -- vital men with ideas and experience and a willingness to write about how to live from the land with respect and care. But their ideas, so far, have gone nowhere, picked up by neither "professors, intellectuals, journalists and economists, let alone the corporations and the politicians of the capitals." Their impact has been negligible.

He knows that the number of people he might count as allies is so small as to be almost unnoticeable, almost invisible among the millions of consumers and spenders. He knows that food, which is too costly for poor people, is far too cheap as its price affects farmers and farming and the possibility of better farming. He knows that the best land, for bad reasons, has become too costly to be purchased by young farmers. He knows that ... most of the farmland is overworked, bruised by the wheels of heavy machines, eroded, poisoned and economically marginal. And so he is forced to question the worth of the advocacy that has so occupied him and his friends for so long.

And there it is -- the question that has lurked behind every book, every speech, every argument, but until now has gone unasked. Has it been worth it?

In a stunning revelation in the essay "The Order of Loving Care," Wendell gives his answer. After a lifetime of casting pearls before swine, he shares that the consolation is not his extraordinary body of work nor its attendant honors, accolades and renown. There's no solace for him in having written so much, or so beautifully. What use, he asks, is literature even, in a toxic and wasting country?

No, his long decades of crying into the wilderness were not even compensated by the knowledge that his name will be remembered long after he's gone. In the end it was the advocacy, and companionship that the advocacy made possible, that made the futility worth it.

Although it took most of his lifetime, Wendell did find his people -- the ones he could walk with in solidarity. They had one another and their alternative classrooms on Amish farms, in Menominee forests, and apparently that was enough. They had "their long collaboration, and the laughter that has been always at least imminent among them, breaking out often when most needed like water from a spring."

Berry wrote The Art of Loading Brush in 2017 when he was 83. It's the work of an old man who knows he's old and who's interested in exploring what it means to be old in a country that refuses to grow up. The years wear us down, and the Wendell we get in this volume is a diminished version of his younger self. But he is not broken. It's the country that's broken, against his every wish. The book's eponymous essay is one of the most touching I've ever read by him -- an account of a shoddy fence repair on his property done uncaringly by hired hands. The clean-up, however, becomes an opportunity to teach a neighbor boy the old ways of working. The story is about a world that violates us right where we live, and about the refusal to be violated.

***

How great it would be to always prevail. How desperately we want to triumph over bad ideas and dangerous men. The bitter truth is that life is not a Hollywood film and there are times, entire lifetimes even, where the job is simply to save something. Which is why, in this book of sober surveyance, Wendell keeps bringing up remnants. The perspective of so many years finally allows Wendell see the true meaning of his life's work. Not as a contributor to a public conversation about the use and care of the land "because there is no conversation," but as a remnant -- a piece of something that's largely lost but in dire need of saving.

By now, amid the clamors of the parties of industrialism, the agrarian argument has become rare, almost unhearable, almost unheard. And yet, among a surviving remnant, the little company of (his) friends among them, the old argument still lives and continues. It is grounded in the obvious truth, the axiom, that the human economy is dependent upon, and limited by, the natural world, which is dependent in turn upon human cherishing, forbearance, and skill.

In other times -- older times --- times that Wendell's writing keeps alive for us, peoples' lives weren't quite so out of order. There was recognition that some things -- many small things -- were worth saving. Like the bits of string, ribbon and dress trimmings Wendell found in his grandmothers belongings after her death, all wound neatly on pieces of cardboard and put away. "How many thousands like her ... had read and believed 'Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost."

Because a new kind of time has come, we are all elders now. Part of our fight will be to keep some of our old ways intact. For if it's the official policy of the US government to go fast and break things, then it must be our unofficial response to gather fragments, that nothing be lost. To begin saving remnants, necessary fragments, and walking like Wendell, who came to understand how he and his friends are remnants themselves of an agrarian tradition lost to time, but not to human flourishing.

This is what advocacy sometimes looks like. Saving something important, with help from others, which is its own reward.

"His work, he thinks, the love that was in it, the love that it was for, has given him a happy life."