Leavings Book

This is my first full collection of Wendell Berry. I've read him here and there, even used part of a poem as my quote of the day, once:

"As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

But this was my first, and he's speaking my language. -Especially right now - I'm writing this on the last day of March, 2020 living under quarantine (or at least social distancing, with everything shut down) and much uncertainty. Part II of the collection is titled "Sabbaths 2005-2008; How may a human being come to rest?"

Well, we're all resting in absurdity right now. Many of us resting at home, but finding ourselves restless. Maybe not sleeping through the night?

His theology and economics are soft spoken, but firm. He stands his ground as we move toward corpocracy and an earth where we've money-mined the carbon from the ground and burned it into a heat-trapping window above us.

Still, I was told recently that Doris Day said "even in the class war, I am a pacifist." I would wager Berry to be a fighter right there with her.

"If we have become incapable
of denying ourselves anything,
then all that we have
will be taken from us."
-p.46 (Part II: Sabbaths; 2005, XII)

His theology (he seems to take umbrage at being ascribed one*) is sown with doubt.

Here's a full poem:

If there are a "chosen few"
then I am not one of them,
if an "elect," well then
I have not been elected.
I am one who is knocking
at the door. I am one whose foot
is on the bottom rung.
But I know that Heaven's
bottom rung is Heaven
though the ladder is standing
on the earth where I work
by day and at night sleep
with my head upon a stone.

p. 61 (Part II: Sabbaths; 2006, I)

Truly, though. If he *does* have a theology. It's love, and honest-living. Loving ourselves, others, and creation.

A LETTER
(to my brother)
Dear John,
You said, "Treat your enemies
as if they could become your best friends."
You were not the first to perpetrate
such an outrage, but you were right.
Try as we might, we cannot
unspring this trap. We can either
befriend our enemies or we can die
with them, in the absolute triumph
of the absolute horror constructed
by us to save us from them.
Tough, but "All right" our Mary said,
"we'll be nice to the sons of bitches."
-p. 10


XIII
Greed is finally being recognized as a virtue...
the best engine of betterment known to man."
-William Safire, 1986

By its own logic, greed
finally destroys itself,
as Lear's wicked daughters
learned to their horror, as
we are learning to our own.
What greed builds is built
by destruction of the materials
and lives of which it is built.
Only mourners survive.
This is the "creative destruction"
of which learnèd economists
speak in praise. But what is made
by destruction comes down at last
to a stable floor, a bed
of straw, and for those with sight
light in darkness.

p. 124 (Part II: Sabbaths; 2008, XIII)


*"Having written some pages in favor of Jesus,
I receive a solemn communication crediting me
with the possession of a "theology" by which
I acquire the strange dignity of being wrong
forever or right forever. Have I gauged exactly
enough the weights of sins? Have I found
too much of the Hereafter in the Here? Or
the other way around? Have I..."