"Letters From the Exiles": The Final Letter

The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

My dear friends,

It has been too long. I miss you all, and I cannot wait to see you shortly. If you had told me in early March that we would all have been unceremoniously sent away for the remainder of the semester, I would not have believed you. I know this because I remember standing in Greg’s the week before talking with a friend about how the hype around COVID-19 was overblown. I also remember when the rumors of quarantine started, how a group of friends discussed spending the quarantine together in my apartment because we expected it to last two weeks. All this naïveté seems quaint now but, throughout the summer, I have been repeatedly reminded how much this virus has laid bare much of the foolhardiness of our contemporary life. We have built walls of scientific hubris that often felt like they offered the flimsy protection of wet cardboard as opinion and consensus changed at what seemed like a weekly pace. It became obvious early on that we knew very little and were constantly behind the curve of learning.

Throughout the summer, I have taken a significant amount of time to focus on the work of Wendell Berry; an agrarian poet, novelist, and essayist who, I think, offers some of the most helpful critique and guidance for people today. One of Berry’s most striking qualities is his ability to question those things that seem like givens in our day. His whole essay, “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” asserts that the principles of place and community by which he lives are fundamental. Among his most revolutionary points as an agrarian is the importance of humility and submission to the reality that the world does not belong to us. Because of this humility, Berry wants people to see that “the existence of the world is rooted in mystery and in sanctity.” In other words, we can never truly know the world we live in. It is akin to Gandalf’s declaration that you can know everything there is to know about Hobbits but still be surprised by them. Berry calls us to recognize our limits as it relates to mastery and understanding. In a time when anything is Googleable, all the knowledge of human history is at our fingertips. It takes humility to “acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never understand it.” Berry’s work asks us to recall and reinstate the value of wonder, humility, and joy. Much of his poetry centers around the desire to experience the beauty and transcendence of the world as God created it, to enter into the “peace of wild things…the presence of still water.” 

In one essay, Berry presciently claims that the “extensive, mobile, highly centralized system….is extremely vulnerable to acts of terrorism.” While I don’t believe the virus was an act of terrorism, I still think Berry’s claim stands. A system that relies on international trade for its very sustenance is doomed to failure in the face of a pandemic like the one we are enduring. Instead, Berry provides an alternate history through his fiction. The novels and stories of Port William provide a cogent, rich, fulfilling look at a community dedicated to each other. In the beautiful novel “Hannah Coulter”, Berry explains the principle that guides the lives of the Port William Citizens: The Membership. Contrary to the “Rugged Individualism” that is often preached in the United States, Berry’s Membership defines people as inherently communal. The Membership is one where “work was freely given in exchange for work freely given…no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed to be done.” I have been blessed this summer to see this vision of humanity in action in many ways. Recently, I met a neighbor for the first time when she offered me a few of her surplus tomatoes. I did not know her name but I did know my other neighbor and had recently offered food to them in a time of need. No thought was given to the monetary value and samplings of food and work flow freely in our small cluster of homes. None of this would be a surprise to people living in small communities across the country. I often think of King’s this way as well. A small, insular community of people committed to a common goal. I am often heartened by the acts of graciousness and kindness that I see on campus; acts of self-giving love for our neighbors. 

Irony might be defined as learning to value community and human connection during a pandemic that threatened to seclude us all. Berry’s Membership is one of hard-won community, only achievable through struggle and effort. One cannot be part of the membership for convenience, but must endure the hard work of a lifetime of giving and receiving when it often makes no economic sense. While fictional, Berry’s Port William series is set against the evolving world of the 19th and 20th Century, where the forces of modernization and globalization threaten to empty small, rural communities of young people searching for something “better.” Yet, Berry asks us to question this impulse as well. He laments that, far more often than not, the drive is for “not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better…but a better place somewhere else.” Membership in a place where you can ask of others but also where others can ask of you. It is thick and it values people in a way that contemporary employment rarely does. Berry laments the contrary “world of organization…the world of employment” as one that “is a life of beginnings without memories…that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use.” As quaint as this might sound, it recalls an interview I heard with a former Netflix employee who explained their policy of letting people whenever they found they had no immediate tasks for them to complete. Even if one is not fully willing to commit to Wendell Berry’s ideal of Membership, the pattern of sustaining relationships far past their economic use is one that looks heavenly compared to one where we are all cogs in a money-making machine.

I cannot say that I unhesitatingly accept Berry’s conclusions: I wrote this piece on a computer and benefit greatly from scientific and technological advances. However, I read him because he shows me that the world I live in is not inevitable and its illnesses have some hope of remedy. If you read Wendell Berry for no other reason, I would urge you to consider him for this: he asks us to value the people and things God created for their own benefit first, not their utility. I leave you with a poem by Mr. Berry “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
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.