Fast Friends

Another thing we had in common was good, solid, loving, and companionate marriages. On one of our car trips, I complained over the useless, trivial hyperactivity of my eyes gazing at women. At any conference, or in an airport on the way, I find myself continually checking out the beauty of young women, dwelling on figures and faces. It disturbed me that I wasted time and energy evaluating quarries I would never mine. Wendell agreed explosively, as if he had been waiting for someone to bring up the subject. He suffered from this idle habit himself, and found himself in lecture halls doing inventories of the female audience. One day, he told me, he saw one face that was absolutely perfect and irresistible to him. It was a few seconds before he realized that his eyes had lighted on his wife, Tanya.


From "The Best Noise in the World," an essay by Donald Hall from the book Wendell Berry: Life and Work edited by Jason Peters.

Small Scale

If a factory began to "grow" or to be noisy at night or on Sunday, that would mean that another such factory was needed somewhere else. If waste should occur at any point, that would indicate the need for an enterprise of some other sort. If poison or pollution resulted from any enterprise, that would be understood as an indication that something was absolutely wrong, and a correction would be made. Small scale, of course, makes such changes and corrections more thinkable and more possible than does large scale.

From An Argument for Diversity by Wendell Berry (1988)

— Wendell Berry

"It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."

Healing —

...

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?

But one is afraid that there will be no rest until the work is finished and the house is in order, the farm is in order, the town is in order, all the loved ones are well.

But it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.

To work at this alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure.

It is despair that sees the work failing in one's own failure.

This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.


—Wendell Berry, "Healing" from What are People For?

living up to his own standards

"I don't think the University of Kentucky can be so ostentatiously friendly to the coal industry ... and still be a friend to me and the interests for which I have stood for the last 45 years. ... If they love the coal industry that much, I have to cancel my friendship." —Wendell Berry

Read: Lexington Herald-Leader and/via NY Times

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be...

Wendell Berry, Ed Fella