The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth Narrated by Nick Offerman

Overview

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities.
The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.
With grace and conviction, Wendell Berry shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy?the natural world will not allow it.
Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

02/05/2018
Berry’s graceful essays have long been models of eloquence, insight, and conviction, as Kingsforth’s selection of some of his most important pieces reminds readers. Berry’s writings traverse topics from agriculture to economics, but always circle back to the values of a small, local economy and to the wastefulness fostered by corporate greed. In a 2011 speech, Berry proclaims, “Our fundamental problem is world destruction, caused by an irreconcilable contradiction between the natural world and the engineered world of industrialism.” In “The Total Economy,” Berry names neighborhood and subsistence the main features of a local economy. In one of his most famous essays, 1989’s “The Pleasures of Eating,” he declares eating “inescapably an agricultural act” and proposes seven ways of eating responsibly—e.g., “participate in food production to the extent that you can” and “learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home”—that look ahead to today’s local food movement. Since all of these essays are readily available elsewhere, Berry’s fans won’t find anything new, but newcomers will find the works exceptionally timely, and the book as a whole a thoughtful introduction to Berry’s writing. (May)

From the Publisher

New & Noteworthy, The New York Times Book Review
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
One of Spirituality & Practice's Best Spiritual Books of the Year

"If these essays were required reading, I think our society would be in a lot better shape." ―Nick Offerman, Entertainment Weekly

"Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him." ―The Washington Post Book World

"America’s greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living." ―Chicago Tribune

"A fascinating tribute to the life of the land . . . Berry's writings are timelier than ever." ―Laura Garmeson, Financial Times

"Berry reminds us that to take small solutions off the table is also a kind of giving up. Some conservationists believe that because ecological problems are structural, there is no point in growing and cooking your own food, in setting down roots in a community, in being kind to your neighbors . . . You may as well drive as much as you want, waste paper towels, and buy meat from corporations that keep pigs in excrement-coated cages. Berry reminds us that to live this way is to forfeit our souls. It is important―no matter what is going on at a macro level―to be kind to your family, your neighbors and the land." ―The New Republic

"Compelling, luminous . . . our modern-day Thoreau. He is unlike anybody else writing today. He writes at least as well as George Orwell and has an urgent message for modern industrial capitalism . . . nobody can risk ignoring him." ―Andrew Marr, New Statesman

"This collection sees the American published on these islands for the first time, and now he has finally stepped ashore, it's worth getting to know him . . . Berry overturns plenty of thoughtful topsoil on environmental issues with a precise pen, and clears any thicket of cosy consensus with a clear eye and cutting hand." ―Irish Times

"It’s no great observation to note that we live in an incredibly polarized time, but, curiously, Berry doesn’t fit neatly into the conservative or liberal camp. There is just enough in his writing to both satisfy and provoke those of all ideological allegiances. Thanks to the Library of America’s efforts to reissue his writings beginning with the first half of his Port William novels and stories as well as his long-time publisher Counterpoint releasing The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, a collection of his non-fiction edited by the aforementioned Kingsnorth, it’s never been easier to find a place to start . . . In these times we could all use his patient instruction." ―Psychology Today

"The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry is a selection of 31 essays spanning five decades of his works, and it could not have come at a better time as our nation thrashes about in search of a voice of reason. Who better than Berry to explain to us 'who we are, where we are, and what we must do to live'? . . . [It] ought to be required reading in every classroom . . . Wendell Berry is our National Guardian Angel!" ―The Christian Science Monitor

"[Berry] speaks out powerfully and poignantly on behalf of family farmers, their land, and their small towns. His spiritual vision of life is informed by a deep love of nature, a profound regard for the details of place, a respect for small-scale economies, and an advocacy of wise stewardship of the earth. Paul Kingsnorth chose the 31 essays for this handsome collection as ample evidence of Berry's inspiring defense of character qualities like rugged individualism, diligence, loyalty, and reverence for nature." ―Spirituality & Practice

"Whether you’re new to the words of Wendell Berry or a longtime fan of this Kentucky poet, farmer, and land-protector, you’ll want to add this tome of unforgettable, earth-moving Southern outdoors writing to the shelf." ―Garden & Gun

"These works are mostly about small-town America, and mostly set on Berry’s farm at Lane’s Landing, once a riverboat stop on the Kentucky River near Port Royal, Kentucky. But not one word stoops to smug nostalgia. He is instead trying to prove that science and economics happen in a place: he draws endlessly and non-repetitively on the deep well of the lived truth of farm life, which delivers up sweet, clear lines of poetry and local lore and a kind of immediate authenticity . . . In writing about the fate of the natural world, Berry is a prophet of the domestic. These essays are about how to make a household here on Earth. That project is made of the 'unrelentingly practical' things that can be done and that give us hope. Feel the dirt under your feet. You have the power." ―Los Angeles Review of Books

"A pleasing selection of essays from the lifelong farmer and award-winning writer . . . A great place to start for those who are not familiar with Berry's work; for those who are, it will be a nostalgic stroll down a rural, wooded Memory Lane. In this day and age, his writings are must-reads." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Wendell Berry’s admirers―a loyal band several generations deep―may blink at the subtitle of this selection of his essays. 'Essential? What’s not essential?' To read or reread these pieces is, however, to warmly affirm editor Kingsnorth. Berry is the philosopher and the prophet of agriculture, community, stability, and friendship, and there is nothing sentimental or utopian anywhere in his advocacy of those things." ―Booklist (starred review)

"Berry’s graceful essays have long been models of eloquence, insight, and conviction . . . Newcomers will find the works exceptionally timely, and the book as a whole a thoughtful introduction to Berry’s writing." ―Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-02-20
A pleasing selection of essays from the lifelong farmer and award-winning writer.It's a wonder that Berry (The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, 2017, etc.) gets any work done on his Kentucky farm given his prodigious literary output. He has written hundreds of essays, and English author Kingsnorth has carefully selected 31 of them, published from 1968 to 2011, to represent the "essential" Berry. Key words in the essay titles signal Berry's ongoing concerns: nature, work, rugged individualism, citizenship, and agriculture. Throughout, he promotes caretaking, faith-keeping, kindness, and peace. In the introduction, Kingsnorth notes, "soil is the recurring image in these essays." In 1989, Berry wrote, "we persist in land-use methods that reduce the potentially infinite power of soil fertility to a finite quantity, which we then proceed to waste as if it were an infinite quantity." The author champions the "renewal of rural communities," which must be accomplished "from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home." In a fine piece on regional literature, Berry laments Twain's conclusion to Huckleberry Finn, which "fails in failing to imagine a responsible, adult community life." Instead, he pines for the "beloved community" of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. Berry also argues fiercely that "illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger." Literacy, he writes, "is not an ornament, but a necessity." Though the author is generally fairly somber, his 1987 essay explaining why he won't buy a computer reveals a sly sense of humor: "If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one."A great place to start for those who are not familiar with Berry's work; for those who are, it will be a nostalgic stroll down a rural, wooded Memory Lane. In this day and age, his writings are must-reads.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173251282
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

A Native Hill


Pull down thy vanity, it is not man


Made courage, or made order, or made grace,


Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.


Learn of the green-world what can be thy place . . .


Ezra Pound, Canto L X X X I


1


The hill is not a hill in the usual sense. It has no 'other side.' It is an arm of Kentucky's central upland known as The Bluegrass; one can think of it as a ridge reaching out from that center, progressively cut and divided, made ever narrower by the valleys of the creeks that drain it. The town of Port Royal in Henry County stands on one of the last heights of this upland, the valleys of two creeks, Gullion's Branch and Cane Run, opening on either side of it into the valley of the Kentucky River. My house backs against the hill's foot where it descends from the town to the river. The river, whose waters have carved the hill and so descended from it, lies within a hundred steps of my door.

Within about four miles of Port Royal, on the upland and in the bottoms upriver, all my grandparents and great-grandparents lived and left such memories as their descendants have bothered to keep. Little enough has been remembered. The family's life here goes back to my mother's great-great-grandfather and to my father's great-grandfather, but of those earliest ones there are only a few vague word-of-mouth recollections. The only place antecedent to this place that has any immediacy to any of us is the town of Cashel in County Tipperary, Ireland, which one of my great-grandfathers left as a boy to spend the rest of his life in Port Royal. His name was James Mathews, and he was a shoemaker. So well did he fit his life into this place that he is remembered, even in the family, as having belonged here. The family's only real memories of Cashel are my own, coming from a short visit I made there five years ago.

And so, such history as my family has is the history of its life here. All that any of us may know of ourselves is to be known in relation to this place. And since I did most of my growing up here, and have had most of my most meaningful experiences here, the place and the history, for me, have been inseparable, and there is a sense in which my own life is inseparable from the history and the place. It is a complex inheritance, and I have been both enriched and bewildered by it.

I began my life as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out. The Depression and World War II delayed the mechanization of the farms here, and one of the first disciplines imposed on me was that of a teamster. Perhaps I first stood in the role of student before my father's father, who, halting a team in front of me, would demand to know which mule had the best head, which the best shoulder or rump, which was the lead mule, were they hitched right. And there came a time when I knew, and took a considerable pride in knowing. Having a boy's usual desire to play at what he sees men working at, I learned to harness and hitch and work a team. I felt distinguished by that, and took the same pride in it that other boys my age took in their knowledge of automobiles. I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed, although I did not understand that at the time. Free of any intuition of its doom, I delighted in it, and learned all I could about it.

That knowledge, and the men who gave it to me, influenced me deeply. It entered my imagination, and gave its substance and tone to my mind. It fashioned in me possibilities and limits, desires and frustrations, that I do not expect to live to the end of. And it is strange to think how barely in the nick of time it came to me. If I had been born five years later I would have begun in a different world, and would no doubt have become a different man.

Those five years made a critical difference in my life, and it is a historical difference. One of the results is that in my generation I am something of an anachronism. I am less a child of my time than the people of my age who grew up in the cities, or than the people who grew up here in my own place five years after I did. In my acceptance of twentieth-century realities there has had to be a certain deliberateness, whereas most of my contemporaries had them simply by being born to them.

In my teens, when I was away at school, I could comfort myself by recalling in intricate detail the fields I had worked and played in, and hunted over, and ridden through on horseback – and that were richly associated in my mind with people and with stories. I could recall even the casual locations of certain small rocks. I could recall the look of a hundred different kinds of daylight on all those places, the look of animals grazing over them, the postures and attitudes and movements of the men who worked in them, the quality of the grass and the crops that had grown on them. I had come to be aware of it as one is aware of one's body; it was present to me whether I thought of it or not.

When I have thought of the welfare of the earth, the problems of its health and preservation, the care of its life, I have had this place before me, the part representing the whole more vividly and accurately, making clearer and more pressing demands, than any idea of the whole. When I have thought of kindness or cruelty, weariness or exuberance, devotion or betrayal, carelessness or care, doggedness or awkwardness or grace, I have had in my mind's eye the men and women of this place, their faces and gestures and movements.

I have pondered a great deal over a conversation I took part in a number of years ago in one of the offices of New York University. I had lived away from Kentucky for several years – in California, in Europe, in New York City. And now I had decided to go back and take a teaching job at the University of Kentucky, giving up the position I then held on the New York University faculty. That day I had been summoned by one of my superiors at the university, whose intention, I had already learned, was to persuade me to stay on in New York 'for my own good.'

The decision to leave had cost me considerable difficulty and doubt and hard thought – for hadn't I achieved what had become one of the almost traditional goals of American writers? I had reached the greatest city in the nation; I had a good job; I was meeting other writers and talking with them and learning from them; I had reason to hope that I might take a still larger part in the literary life of that place. On the other hand, I knew I had not escaped Kentucky, and had never really wanted to. I was still writing about it, and had recognized that I would probably need to write about it for the rest of my life. Kentucky was my fate – not an altogether pleasant fate, though it had much that was pleasing in it, but one that I could not leave behind simply by going to another place, and that I therefore felt more and more obligated to meet directly and to understand. Perhaps even more important, I still had a deep love for the place I had been born in, and liked the idea of going back to be part of it again. And that, too, I felt obligated to try to understand. Why should I love one place so much more than any other? What could be the meaning or use of such love?

The elder of the faculty began the conversation by alluding to Thomas Wolfe, who once taught at the same institution. 'Young man,' he said, 'don't you know you can't go home again?' And he went on to speak of the advantages, for a young writer, of living in New York among the writers and the editors and the publishers.

The conversation that followed was a persistence of politeness in the face of impossibility. I knew as well as Wolfe that there is a -certain metaphorical sense in which you can't go home again – that is, the past is lost to the extent that it cannot be lived in again. I knew perfectly well that I could not return home and be a child, or recover the secure pleasures of childhood. But I knew also that as the -sentence was spoken to me it bore a self-dramatizing sentimentality that was absurd. Home – the place, the countryside – was still there, still pretty much as I left it, and there was no reason I could not go back to it if I wanted to.

As for the literary world, I had ventured some distance into that, and liked it well enough. I knew that because I was a writer the literary world would always have an importance for me and would always attract my interest. But I never doubted that the world was more important to me than the literary world; and the world would always be most fully and clearly present to me in the place I was fated by birth to know better than any other.

And so I had already chosen according to the most intimate and necessary inclinations of my own life. But what keeps me thinking of that conversation is the feeling that it was a confrontation of two radically different minds, and that it was a confrontation with significant historical overtones.

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