Voice: Wendell Berry
Read these passages. Let them train your ear. The voice is in the rhythm.
From "The Pleasures of Eating"
Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, "What can city people do?" "Eat responsibly," I have usually answered. Of course I have tried to explain what I meant, but afterward I have always felt there was more to be said.
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as consumers.
Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea - something they do not know or imagine - until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.
The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers - passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and beg you to eat it - for a price, of course.
The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating.
From "The Work of Local Culture"
For many years my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth.
The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their feathers and droppings. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human.
However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical.
A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself - in lore and story and song - that will be its culture. A community must be well remembered to know itself by, and so to be prompted always to do better than it has done before. A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help.
As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. It is also a loss of history. The mind becomes the slave of fashion and novelty.
From "Faustian Economics"
The commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable - a license that classifies the bigotry of the KKK with the right to freedom of speech and accepts the destruction of the natural world as a legitimate cost of doing business.
To define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals - which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the tyrant Mephistopheles cry in Marlowe's Faustus that "ichell hath no limits." It is this supposed limitlessness that we have obscured the question of limits and the necessity of limits.
Our national faith so far has been: "There's always more." Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People now genuinely seem to be embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, immense amounts of money, or both. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.
From "The Body and the Earth"
The question of human limits, of the proper definition and place of human beings within the order of Creation, finally rests upon our attitude toward our biological existence, the life of the body in this world. What value and respect do we give to our bodies? What uses do we have for them? What relation do we see, if any, between body and mind, or body and soul?
These are both religious and agricultural questions. Our bodies are not distinct from the bodies of other people, on which they depend for food, clothing, and shelter. They are not distinct from the bodies of plants and animals, with which they are involved in the cycles of feeding and in the intricate companionships of ecological systems. They are not distinct from the earth, the sun, and the air, from which they live.
The concept of health is rooted in the concept of wholeness. To be healthy is to be whole. The word "health" belongs to a family of words, a listing of which will suggest how far the consideration of health must carry us: heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, holy. And so it is possible to give a definite meaning to the statement that the concept of health is rooted in the concept of wholeness.
To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation. By dividing body and soul, we divide both from all else. We thus condemn ourselves to a loneliness for which the only compensation is violence - against other creatures, against the earth, against ourselves.
Signature Sentences
"A human community, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place."
"The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove 'drudgery' from our lives."
"We have given up the understanding - dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought - that we and our country create one another."
"What I stand for is what I stand on."
"The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it."
"We are the belongings of the world, not its owners."
"I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work."
"The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money."
Applying This Voice
Channel the rhythm. Do not announce it.
- •No contractions ("cannot" not "can't")
- •Assertions get elaborated, not stacked
- •End in a moment, not a summary
Avoid: Correlative constructions, staccato lists, thesis-statement openings.
The Berry-ness should be felt, not announced.
Related Skills
- •Enhanced by: voice-matching-wizard
- •Feeds into: human-writing, ghostwriter