The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry has been writing about agriculture and agrarianism since the 1960s. His thinking on these subjects is part of a broader philosophy oft place, community, stewardship, and faith. He has expressed it in essays, novels, short stories, poetry, speeches and interviews. The agrarian essays have been collected and published as “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.” Edited by Norman Wirzba, the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke University, the 21 essays collectively represent the man’s thinking on the land and how it’s used and misused.After reading the collection, it can be said that reading one essay is like reading them all. Not because he is repetitious, for he is never that, but because he is holistic, writing from a unified perspective. (In some cases, he’s speaking, for several of the essays are speeches.) You might disagree with what he says, but he always makes his points with consistency, politeness, and insight into the human character as well as the wiles and strategies of the modern culture.The essays, written from the 1960s to the 1990s, cover a diverse array of subjects, all related to Berry’s agrarian philosophy. These include what he calls “the unsettling of America,” feminism, racism, marriage, health, land, community, conservation, pleasure, the idea of a local economy, energy, eating, and the role of Christianity. His Christian faith informs and infuses his agrarian ideas; he might say there is no difference between his Christian faith and agrarianism.Berry paints a stark contrast between industrialism, technology, and progress with agrarianism. “Whereas industrialism is a way of though based on monetary capital and technology,” he says, “agrarianism is a way of thought based on land. Agrarianism, furthermore, is a culture at the same time it is an economy. Industrialism is an economy before it is a culture.”What’s fascinating is how Berry ties our understanding of the land into a host of related areas, like the division of roles in marriage, racism, technology and technological progress, and the mentality of exploitation. And he says that the purpose of technological progress is not love of God, family, or country, but money and ease. And right there he pits himself against not only Big Agriculture but also Big Government with its hordes of experts.Berry is an important figure in agriculture and America, and the essays in “The Art of the Commonplace” go far in explaining why. It’s a solid collection, assembled and organized well, and represent the man’s broad thinking on agriculture, land, and people.

I suppose I was expecting Aldo Leopold from an area closer to me. The book is fine if that your taste run to the flowery but I found it a little stilted and hard to keep my interest. It just wasn't my cup of tea, doesn't mean it isn't an excellent book. Berry has a lot of insight but coming from an area so close to where I live, I expected him to be a little more concise.

This collection of essays covers many topics of importance in life. Even though some were written almost half a century ago, their description of our current culture is by my opinion accurate and at times prophetic for its era. I believe this book is a very relevant read for what’s happening in our world: crisis due to widespread loneliness, crisis due to climate change, crisis due to distrust in government and so many more.

And outstanding collection of Wendell Berry essays. Well-edited to form a coherent collection. I quote from these often, and have taught essay writing using them--especially "A Native Hill."

This book took me more time to get through than any other I can recall, page for page, because I had to constantly set it down and take notes. In fantastic irony I was taking these notes on my phone and emailing them to myself. Berry would be so horrified! I ended up with about 6,000 words of notes from this, and that's from having read half the essays (generally I take about 0 notes when reading a text). As a young suburbanite who considers himself extremely "progressive" and very pro government, as someone who has made a life of living off fake food, as an atheist, as a rationalist obsessed with finding all the correct answers and believing we will find them in the laboratory, and as a current student at an agricultural university where the agriculture department is invisible (and committed to biotechnology) and everything else is business, I was taken by this selection of essays and essentially thrown against the wall. I've absolutely never been so influenced by a single text in my life.Berry is the first person I have ever conversed with (and because of the way this man writes it feels like I did converse with him) who could explain traditional religious ideals in terms of their actual practical application. As a student of literature, despite my societal and technologically ingrained commitment to specialization and fragmentation and fracture, I at least recognize that there is something to a story, something that is difficult, right now, to explain in terms of a series of chemical reactions in the reader's mind. Don't misunderstand me: I am an atheist and a materialist still, but that's exactly the point. Berry, despite his protestantism, explains everything in the most rational and sequential way possible. He is the first person who's been able to explain why marriage matters in a way my mind can grasp, why fidelity matters, why restraint matters. Amazing. These are things I've always felt mattered, but had suspected it was merely the product of my upbringing and culture. Berry absolutely undermined my sense that the humanities and higher education and "critical thinking" ought to be the way to go. I'm still just blown away by how radically my perceptions have been altered.Perhaps for folks who grew up on farms, this all is nothing new. This collection is critical for those land and food starved folks like me, those trained in critical thinking who have that nagging sense in the back of their mind that they are missing something.I've already ordered two of these to ship to friends and family, and I can't wait for spring, where I can at least be part of a community supported agriculture project, a shared venture for fresh food, something to reconnect me to the cycle, because that's what it is -- and I'd never once considered that. We humans, we don't have to be a disease.There is a lot of repetition in this book, because it's a collection of essays spanning, I don't know, 40 years. But repetition is perhaps what people like me need before we can even begin to begin to begin to GET IT. Also, while I skipped several essays, as the reading was on assignment for a literature course, whatever you do, get your hands on this and read the essay "The Body and the Earth."

My favorite book. Seller was fast and honest.

Challenging, insightful and packed full of amazing disclosures of what was in the mind of Wendell Berry on many subjects. This collection of essays will stand against any other that some university English department assigns. You won't find eloquence such as this except from very few sources, but find it you must because you will be enriched by each essay you read from this collection. Then after you've put it down for a few years, you can go back to it and still gain from multiple readings.

awesome book great value

Wonderful, in parts surprising and intuitive, essential for addressing the problems of a culture of disengagement from nature and alienation from others. There's something therapeutic about reading these essays as an antidote to our focus on consumption and material wealth.

Excellent

Heavy truth, light truth. Its all here.

Such a good read, can't put it down.