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Wendell BerryA Selection of Works by

according to his Ten Commandments

These instructions are at the heart of Berry’s personal and literary world, and collectively they express the thesis informing all of his work, a canon now in excess of thirty books of essays, f ictions and poetry:

1. Beware the justice of Nature.

2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in def iance of Nature.

3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.

4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity and glamour.

5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.

6. Put the interest of the community f irst.

7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.

8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.

9. As far as you are able to make your lives dependent up on your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.

10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work; work well.

wendell berry’s ten commandments

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The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on the health of small streams; the health of small streams depends on the health of their watersheds. The health of the water is exactly the same as the health of the land; the health of the small places is exactly the same as the health of large places. As we know, disease is hard to confine.

contempt for small places

We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt for small places and small streams. Small destructions add up and f inally they are understood collectively as large destructions.

because natural law is in force everywhere, infections move.

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The hill pasture, an open place among the trees, tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill dark f loodwater moves down the river.

in this world

the sun sets. ahead of nightfall

the birds sing.

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men are making plans, wearing themselves out,spending their lives , in order to kill each other.

I have climbed up to water the horses and now sit and rest high on the hillside,letting the day gather and pass. Below mecattle graze out across the wide f ields of the bottomlands,slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world

I owned a slope full of stones.Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,Shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocksWhere the earth caught and kept themDark, an old music mute in themThat my head keeps now I have dug them out. I broke them where they slugged in their darkCells, and lifted them up in pieces.As I piled them in the light

the stones

i began their music. i heard their old lime rouse in breath of song that has not

left me.

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I owned a slope full of stones.Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,Shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocksWhere the earth caught and kept themDark, an old music mute in themThat my head keeps now I have dug them out. I broke them where they slugged in their darkCells, and lifted them up in pieces.As I piled them in the light

i began their music. i heard their old lime rouse in breath of song that has not

left me.I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.What bond have I made with the earth, Having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singingI have carried with me out of that day.The stones have given me musicThat f igures for me their holes in the earthAnd their long lying in the dark.They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground, and I must prepare a f itting silence.

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I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.What bond have I made with the earth, Having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singingI have carried with me out of that day.The stones have given me musicThat f igures for me their holes in the earthAnd their long lying in the dark.They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground, and I must prepare a f itting silence.

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to go in the dark with a

light is to know the light

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to go in the dark with a

light is to know the light

to know the dark

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and f ind that with the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

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It was a different world, a new world to her, that she came into then– a world of poverty and community. They were in a neighborhood of six households, counting their own, all within half a mile of one another. Besides themselves there were Braymer and Josie Hardy and their children; Tom Hardy and his wife, also named Josie; Walter and Thelma Cotman and their daughter, Irene; Jonah and Daisy Hample and their children; and Uncle Isham and Aunt Frances Quail, who were Thelma Cotman’s and Daisy Hample’s parents. The two Josies, to save confusion, were called Josie Braymer and Josie Tom. Josie Tom was Walter Cotman’s sister. In the world that Mary Penn had given up, a place of far larger and richer farms, work was sometimes exchanged, but the families were conscious of themselves in a way that set them apart from one another. Here, in this new world, neighbors were always working together.

Some work only the men did together, like haying and harvesting the corn. Some work only the women did together: sewing or quilting or wallpapering or housecleaning; and whenever the men were together working, the women would be together cooking. Some work the men and women did together: harvesting tobacco or killing hogs or any other job that needed many hands. It was an old community. They all had worked together a long time. They all knew what each one was good at.

“many hands make light work,” uncle isham quail loved to say, though his own old hands were no longer able to work much.

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a jonquil for mary penn

“many hands make light work,” uncle isham quail loved to say, though his own old hands were no longer able to work much.

When they worked together, not much needed to be explained. When they went down to the little weatherboarded church at Goforth on Sunday morning, they were glad to see one another and had much to say, though they had seen each other almost daily during the week.

This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and took them in with a warmth that answered her parents’ rejection. The men, without asking or being asked, included Elton in whatever they were doing. They told him when and where they needed him. They came to him when he needed them. He was an apt and able hand, and they were glad to have his help. He learned from them all but liked best to work with Walter Cotman, who was a f ine farmer. He and Walter were, up to a point, two of a kind; both were impatient of disorder—”I can’t stand a damned mess,” said Walter, and he made none—and both loved the employment of their minds in their work. They were unlike in that Walter was satisf ied within the boundaries of his little farm, but Elton could not have been. Nonetheless, Elton loved his growing understanding of Walter’s character and his ways. Though he was a quiet man and gave neither instruction nor advice, Walter was Elton’s teacher, and Elton was consciously his student.

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Once, when they had killed hogs and Elton and Mary had stayed at home to f inish rendering their lard, the boiling fat had foamed up and begun to run over the sides of the kettle. Mary ran to the house and called Walter on the party line.

“Tell him to throw the f ire to it, “ Walter said. “Tell him to dip out some lard and throw it on the f ire.”

Elton did so, unbelieving, but the f ire f lared, grew hotter, the foaming lard subsided in the kettle, and Elton’s face relaxed from anxiety and self-accusation into a grin.“Well,” he said, quoting Walter in Wal-ter’s voice, “it’s all in knowing how.”

Mary, who had more to learn than Elton, became a daughter to every woman in the community.

Thelma, Daisy, and the two Josies taught her their ways of cooking, cleaning, and sewing; they taught her to can, pickle, and preserve; they taught her to do the women’s jobs in the hog killing. They took her on their expeditions to one another’s houses to cook harvest meals or to houseclean or to gather corn from the f ields and can it. One day they all walked down to Goforth to do some wallpapering for Josie Tom’s mother. They papered two rooms, had a good time, and Josie Tom’s mother f ixed them a dinner of fried chicken, creamed new potatoes and peas, hot biscuits, and cherry cobbler.

she came knowing little,

barely enough to begin,and they taught her much.

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she came knowing little,

In cold weather they sat all afternoon in one another’s houses, quilting or sewing or embroidering. Josie Tom was the best at needlework. Everything she made was a wonder. From spring to fall, for a Christmas present for someone, she always embroidered a long cloth that began with the earliest f lowers of spring and ended with the last f lowers of fall. She drew the f lowers on the cloth with a pencil and worked them in with her needle and colored threads. She included the f lowers of the woods and f ields, the dooryards and gardens. She loved to point to the penciled outlines and name the f lowers as if calling them up in their beauty into her imagination. “Looka- there,” she would say. “I even put in a jimsonweed.”“And a bull thistle,” said Tom Hardy, who had his doubts about weeds and thistles but was proud of her for leaving nothing out.

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Growing weather; enough rain;the cow’s udder tight with milk;the peach tree bent with its yield; honey golden in the white comb-,

the pastures deep in clover and grass,enough, and more than enough;

the ground, new worked, moistand yielding underfoot, the feetcomfortable in it as roots;

the early garden: potatoes, onions,peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots, radishes, marking their straight rowswith green, before the trees are leafed’,

raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage,strawberries red ripe with the white f lowers still on the vines-picked with the dew on them, before breakfast;

grape clusters heavy under broad leaves, powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness-an ancient delight, delighting;

the satisfactions a/the mad farmer

the bodies of children, joyfulwithout dread of their spending,surprised at nightfall to be weary;

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the bodies of children, joyfulwithout dread of their spending,surprised at nightfall to be weary;

the bodies of women in loose cotton, cool and closed in the eveningsof summer like contented houses’,

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the bodies of women in loose cotton, cool and closed in the eveningsof summer like contented houses’,

the bodies of men, able in the heat and sweat and weight and length of the day’s work, eager in their spending, attending to nightfall, the bodies of women;

sleep after love, dreamingwhite lilies bloomingcoolly out of the f lesh;

after sleep, enablement to go on with work, morning a

clear gift;the maidenhood of the day, cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass;

the work of feeding and clothing and housing,done with more than enough knowledgeand with more than enough love,by those who do not have to be told;

any building well built, the raftersf irm to the walls, the walls f irm, the joists without give, the proportions clear, the f itting exact, even unseen, bolts and hinges that turn homewithout a jiggle;

any work worthyof the day’s maidenhood;

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clear gift;

any man whose wordslead precisely to what exists,who never stoops to persuasion;

the talk of friends, lightened and clearedby all that can be assumed;

deer tracks in the wet path,the deer sprung from them, gone on;

live streams, live shiftingsof the sun in the summer woods;

the great hollow-trunked beech,a landmark I loved to return to, its leaves gold-lit on the silverbranches in the fall: blown downafter a hundred years of standing,a footbridge over the stream;

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the quiet in the woods of a summer morning,the voice of a peewee passing through it like a tight silver wire

a little clearing among cedars,white clover and wild strawberriesbeneath an opening to the sky-heavenly, I thought it, so perfect; had I forseen itI would have desired it no less than it deserves;

fox tracks in snow, the impact of lightness upon lightness,unendingly silent.

What I know of spirit is astir in the world. The god I have always expected to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning,

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i have always expected to bea great relisher of this world,its good grown immortal in his mind.

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prayers and sayings of the mad farmer

Sowing the seed, my hand is one with the earth. Wanting the seed to grow, my mind is at one with the light. Hoeing the crop, my hands are at one with the rain.Having cared for the plants, my mind is at one with the air. Hungry and trusting, my mind is one with the earth. Eating the fruit,

my body is one

with the earth.

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