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

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Cover to cover this book encompasses twenty-one powerful essays spanning as many years, from "The Unsettling of America" (1977) to "The Whole Horse" (1999). It is basically the backdoor into the house of Berry's thought, the best way to familiarize oneself with his writings without buying all his books. In fact, to date, it is the only such compilation currently available.

For me personally, reading Berry is a kind of sacrament taken with the utmost reverence and joy. Like the bark of an ancient redwood tree, the essays are imbued with scent and deep, earthly texture. This language serves the underlying themes well -- themes of love, work, earth and health. Indeed, many of the essays set out explicitly to reestablish the hidden connections between body and soul, individual and community; the former necessarily connected with the land that created and sustains us. Like hymns to one's sense of place, one reads Berry and is transported back home.

"I came to see myself growing out of the earth like the other animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn."

Full of common sense, prophetic visions, poetic beauty and cogent analyses of America's cultural crises, these essays will retain their relevance and charm for generations if not millennia to come. At present, I can think of no single author better suited to guide us through these troubled times. Humble, illuminating, honest and profound -- this is one thinker not to be overlooked by anyone concerned with our fate as species and the fate of the planet as a whole. Definitely one of the most important, soul-satisfying books I have ever read.

For me the central theme of this book can be illustrated in this quote. " I don't think it is appreciated how much of an outdoor book the Bible is." Berry is a deeply religious man who lives his religion every moment in his deep, deep connections to the land, to all animals, to community,to the growing of food, and to the world as an organic entity.

As wonderful as it is to have Poet Laureates, I wish we also had Philosopher Laureates and that Wendell Berry had that forum. His thoughts are important for the national consciousness.

"The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life."

Berry advocates watching government closely, nationally but particularly locally. When it comes time to protest, he calls for facts and good arguments, not just slogans and buttons.
"I would rather go before the governement with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied."

These essays span several decades but the ideas are more relevant today than when they were written. The trends and programs, such as GATT and the loss of topsoil and the rise of megafarms, are as bad as he feared but time has proven them even more destructive.

"Restraint - for us, now - above all:the ability to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to 'solve' problems by ignoring them, accepting them as 'tradeoffs', or bequesthing them to posterity. A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law."

Sometimes, during and after reading a particular book, I feel as though I could not have read anything more appropriate at that time.

The book blows me away with its depth, its insight, or the amazing questions it raises.

The Art of the Commonplace is one of those books, and it may be the best introduction to Wendell Berry a reader can ask for. As a collection of essays over more than twenty years, it covers a wide range of social issues-such as agriculture and the environment, family and marriage, consumerism, and globalism-which is amazing given that all of them relate to agrarian topics.

Berry poses questions that most of us never consider, and I believe that is the main reason Berry is one of the most desperately needed Christian writers in today's America.

I had never read Wendell Berry before, and this book has provided me with a very comprehensive introduction to his thought. Berry advocates abandoning the present resource exploitative global industrial economy in favor of local economies and a more responsible, ethical treatment of the Earth. He is against "free trade" and the free market economy, because it strengthens corporations and eliminates farmers. He is a strong proponent of sustainable agriculture, but he mostly avoids discussing the science here and concentrates rather on the ethics of land use and food production. He's a confessed Luddite, in that he detests technology when it replaces human labor. He's also a devout Christian, but offers a unique interpretation of the Bible that sounds an awful lot like Pantheism. He believes we should place more emphasis on marriage, family, and community life, and replace our meaningless occupations with meaningful vocations. Berry's main argument is that for the sake of a little money and ease we have ceded too much of our decision-making responsibility to the corporations and the government, thereby giving up our personal freedom and becoming passive bystanders rather than active participants in the world in which we live.

Though I don't agree with Berry on every issue, I found his writings very enlightening and in some cases mind-blowing. Berry is a brilliant diagnostician. I doubt there's a writer alive who can better enunciate the ills of modern society. Unfortunately, this collection doesn't prescribe a clear course of treatment. Berry proposes we take up organic gardening and invest in local food--good first steps, indeed--but that hardly seems sufficient to overthrow a status quo that's existed since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Much of Berry's agrarianism seems to harken back to a time when the population of the world was one tenth if not one hundredth of what it is today, yet he's against birth control. On an Earth full to bursting, how practical are his dreams of a quasi-Amish society?

Most of the faults of this book are editorial rather than authorial. The collection is relentlessly repetitive, with the same points being hammered home again and again. Berry states his case so elegantly and eloquently, do we really need to be beat over the head with it? When I first started reading the book I was excited by Berry's ideas; by the end I just wanted to get it over with. For this reason, I would recommend taking a break between essays.

The Kindle file, inexplicably, has no table of contents. There is a bibliographic list of essays in the very back of the book, but you have to hunt for it, and it's not interactive. It's also difficult to tell when exactly some of these pieces were written. Some essays begin with a date, some end with a date, others are simply undated.

Whether you're a liberal or a conservative, a Christian or a freethinker, you will find much food for thought in this collection of essays. If you care about the world in which we live, then Berry's perspective is worth a listen.

If I had to recommend one single book to inform the solutions to the problems of the 21st century, it would be The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.

Among the many great manifestos and other eye-opening books I have read, from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals to Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair to Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman to Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy to The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage), I find all of them enriched by Berry's fundamental insights into the essence what what being human means, including the bits that, in the late 20th century/early 21st century, our modern society has attempted to ignore, diminish, or outright suppress. Berry's own unique experiences, and his poetic as well as prophetic ways of speaking bring us back to the garden, in both a literal and a religious sense. It is a return long overdue.

Michael Pollan was the first person to recommend Wendell Berry's writings to me, and my only regret is that I waited four years to actually act on his recommendation. Not to take anything away from Pollan, but the most astonishing aspects I read in The Omnivore's Dilemma were all perfectly predicted--in detail--by essays contained in this book written back in 1977. (And to his credit, Pollan gives the credit to Berry.) But Berry does far more than to expose the health risks of industrial agriculture, or its destruction of our environment, or its ruin of the rural economy; he speaks about community and, when there is no other way around it, communion. His honesty is as surprising as it is refreshing.

The human race will be greatly challenged by the consequences of global warming, population growth, and the exhaustion of natural resources we have depended upon as if they were infinite and ours to control. Berry argues, and he has convinced me, that until we understand and fulfill our obligations to each other, we are doomed to destroy our selves. His alternative vision to monotonic (and hence obviously unsustainable) growth is timely, compelling, and most importantly, sensible.

A word about the title: when I first saw it, I figured it was a kind of how-to guide on understanding and maintaining communities and the commons. But it is a lot more than that. As I finished it, I realized that Berry was speaking as well to the art that springs *from* the commonplace. It is the generative power of a field well tended that creates such art that it is called human. This book made me realize, as Ulysses once did, that we are not only creators but also extraordinary creations, and we must honor that which creates us--the commons.

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."

This book is brilliant - Wendell Berry takes fragments of my experience, synthesises them into wise philosophies and sensible perspectives, and communicates them in descriptive eloquent prose. "Singing my life with his words"... A must for anyone working in the good food industry. The editor is to be congratulated for such an elegant selection of Berry's works.

Berry holds no punches in telling about sustainable living, holding traditions of old and how the way we're developing and farming this world can't last. Most of the essays were written 30 years ago or so, but Berry was way ahead of his time and a lot of his thoughts. This collection is especially important now as we've become "exploiters" of the land. These essays will inspire you to become a "nurturer" of the land.

This is the first Wendell Berry book I've read. I was vastly disappointed after reading some much praise for his works. Much of his work is overly flowery and long-winded.

There are a few gems this collection of essays: "A Native Hill" and "The Whole Horse" come to mind. These few essays stick to what Berry knows through experience. They reflect a deep connection the land and suggest a transcendental theme ala Thoreau.

Other essays focus on Berry's attempt to justify and explain the 'agrarian ethic'. Berry suggests that returning to locally based economies will restore a connection to the land. Having a connection to the land will result in people no longer destroying the earth.

While I agree strongly that this is the case, Berry does a terrible job of convincing anyone but religious and environmental zealots. The essays are filled with Biblical references and strange interpretations of obscure literature. He leaves much to be desired. Only rarely does Berry refer to anything practical or in the real world.

Berry's ideas are largely untested, untried and Utopian. He admits as much. Too often Berry refers to things as infinite and unknowable. This is a dangerous course. In attempting to discribe the ideal life Berry fails to point out the one thing that could bring down the house of cards Globalization is built on: local economics. Indeed for all his talk of human economy (running the household and community), he ignores the more standard meaning of the word.

I wanted to like this, because I enjoy Wendell Berry's poetry. However, this is just another set of essays by a privileged white man about HIS environment.

His essay about race and the economy demonstrates that even when white people want to do good, they still reinforce white privilege and superiority. Speaking about African-Americans, Berry adopts a patronizing tone that reminds you that when he uses the n-word (as he does repeatedly throughout the book, most of the time (but not always) in quotes) he really does consider himself better than people of color.

How else can we read something like this:

"The transition from slave to citizen is good. But the transition from useful and therefore valuable slaves to useless and therefore costly economic dependents is a bewilderment" (on page 52)

except to assume that Wendell believes that African-American people in poverty are useless. Useless to whom, one wonders? The children they are raising? Their spouses or lovers? The world of art, literature and music to which African-Americans (yes, even in poverty) contribute their voices in powerful, meaningful ways?

Apparently for Wendell it all comes down to economics and what the black folk can do for him. Blacks were valuable when they worked in Berry's tobacco fields "alongside" his family. But now that those blacks just "sit around" in cities "doing nothing", well, now they are useless to him.