Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer from Kentucky. He’s in his eighties now, but he still works on his land as he always has done, using horse-drawn tools and old methods. The World-Ending Fire collects his essays, ranging in topic from politics to death, books to the environment. They are all tied together by their focus on localism and attachment to place. Without a real connection to your land you will struggle to live a good life, and you will struggle to live a sustainable life. That is his message, repeated over the course of the book in essay after essay. Slow down, pay attention, and enjoy the simple things. It is a relatively fashionable view now, but Berry has been living it and writing it for over fifty years.
Welcome to Kentucky
Berry has lived in the same place for a long time. When he was young, he did travel about, and even briefly lived in Europe, but all that’s behind him now. He has his home, his community in Kentucky. And for Berry it is the most important place in the world. In The World-Ending Fire he is always praising the ideal of community, where people help each other, tells stories, and share things. And here it is convincing where elsewhere it would surely get on my nerves because Berry actually lives this life. In essays like “The Making of a Marginal Farm” and “Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labour Saving” he really goes into some detail about how it is to live a largely self-sufficient existence. Berry writes with a pencil, only during the daylight hours. One of his most famous essays describes his refusal to buy a computer.
This simple life is under threat by the industrialisation of farming, by consumerism, by strip mining and plenty of other things. About half of The World-Ending Fire is diatribes against the unpleasant parts of modernity, and about half a paean to the things modernity seems to be trampling – community, responsibility, and kindness. Many of the essays repeat each other, but I find it hard to ignore the validity of Berry’s message. Below I’ll go over a few of its key points.
Scale and Limits
One of my favourite essays here is “Quantity versus Form”, a short piece originally written for a conference. It tells the story of an old friend of Berry’s who sold her things and went to a nursing home. When they meet there, she is at peace and ready to die. But she then stays alive at the hands of her doctors, and when Berry and she next meet, she is but a shell of her former self. Medicine has kept her alive, but for what? Berry’s target in this piece is not modern medicine, but its application. In the past, he argues, there was an ideal of “a whole or complete life”, whereas now we think only of “a long life”. And these two ideas are incompatible, because they carry with them two different views of the world.
The complete life is one summed up by Lord Nelson’s words at Trafalgar, “Thank God, I have done my duty”. It is a life bounded by duty, by obligations – in other words, connected with others. Nelson perceived his duty, fulfilled it, and was happy to die. He felt no need to experience any more, to see any more. He achieved completeness, and that was enough. Berry points out that though few of us will be admirals, almost all of us will – or should – take part in a community, be part of a family, follow one’s calling, and enjoy things like food and drink and company. If we do all of these things, death need not be something worth fearing, because we can rightly be said to have lived properly and need ask nothing more.
In contrast to this limited life, a life searching after length will always be disappointing. There will always be something to miss out on and therefore a reason to hate death. Berry is not against experiences, but he is against a worldview that does not acknowledge human limitations. When we deprive ourselves of a sense of our limits we encourage a similarly laissez-faire attitude towards the world around us. We start to exploit resources as we try to stave off our inevitable passing. And no amount of resources will be enough, because our deaths will always come. If we choose to limit ourselves, to accept death (I’m pretty sure Berry and Heidegger have a couple of things in common on this point), then life will be much more meaningful. We will be able to give it completion and die satisfied.
Memory
There are different types of knowledge, Berry reminds us in “The Way of Ignorance”, and that which is empirically verifiable is only one of them. Time and again Berry makes us think about memory, and what kind of knowledge that is, and what value it might have. In “Damage”, one of the shorter and better essays, he describes the damage he accidentally causes to his land with a bulldozer. It is a terrible thing, he writes, to directly contribute to the destruction of the natural world. But Berry also finds in the scar left by the bulldozer on the ground a positive element – for it has affected him. So long as he remembers about the damage, he will not repeat it. And as long as he takes part in a community, that knowledge of destruction will be common to all – and destruction will be avoided.
One of Berry’s keenest laments in The World-Ending Fire is the loss of cultural memory that comes from leaving the communities in which you were born and watching the communities disintegrate. Almost all of us know that strip mining is a dangerous process that destroys the landscape, or that farming by insecticides and computers may not be ultimately the healthiest approach. But without participating in a community where that knowledge is experienced, rather than simply known, we do not feel it in quite the same way. And this lack of feeling, stemming from a kind of ignorance, ultimately leaves a space for tolerance: when we do not witness destruction while getting benefits from it (such as the gold circuitry in our phones), we are liable to forget the destruction or else to accept it. In a community, we have shared knowledge of destruction, and cannot so peacefully accept its results.
Reading and Writing
Berry also laments the loss of reading, which he connects with the rise of television. Again and again in The World-Ending Fire Berry comes back to the classics, because the classics are sustainable – unlike modern technology, they are never superseded. And in the classics Berry finds plenty to support his arguments in these essays. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus illustrates a piece on our fossil fuel consumption, while Milton’s Satan makes us think about human limits. Unlike science, which encourages a belief in limitless progress (because so far it has happened, and all it has cost is the destruction of nature and the climate), literature is by nature bounded. A play is just a play, a poem cannot grow new cantos once its author is dead. But just as Berry thinks a life can be beautiful and valuable while lived within limits through using those limits well, so too can literature.
After all, in hundreds of years we have not run out of sonnets to fit into their assigned fourteen lines. The importance of completion, rather than insatiability, is what Berry takes away from many of the works he quotes. In the past, it seems, writers understood that too much knowledge would lead to our destruction. Berry is not against progress, but he is deeply conservative. He’s concerned about the pace of progress, and I think he’s right when it comes to some of his targets.
A Few Points of Dissent
The essays of The World-Ending Fire were written over a period of about fifty years, and their order in the book is not chronological (I’m not sure what it is, however). The essays don’t need to be chronological, though, because Berry does not appear to change his mind – but then again, the world he attacks does not change much either. I remember reading his essay “Think Little”, about some faults in the environmental movement in America, and being surprised (and a little depressed) when I finished it to see it was written literally fifty years ago and not more recently. The problem, reading The World-Ending Fire, is more that Berry repeats himself quite a bit. His worldview is wonderful, and he defends it nobly, but in his essays he never seems to develop. It does mean that eventually you get a little tired of him.
I’m also not sure that his solutions are as fully explored as they ought to be, either. I have no problem with Berry using a car while avoiding computers – he knows the limits to his lifestyle. What I do have a problem with is the suggestion that everyone can move into the countryside and start farming. There are too many people in the world now for that to be a sensible or effective solution. I do not know about topsoil or any other specifically ecological problems like strip mining, but I do know that while technology may not be able to save humanity, it’s the only thing that has a chance to save us from ourselves. Just moving to the countryside and adopting an agrarian isn’t a workable solution because nobody, Berry included, can convert enough people to that approach fast enough.
It is a frightening path that we are heading down, and I don’t enjoy being young while going down it. But it’s mildly heartwarming to see (as part of an internship I’m doing) just how the companies of the world are reducing their emissions, and how people really are taking things relatively seriously now. We have destroyed so much, and we will destroy yet more in time, but there is a chance that the likes of carbon capture and storage will give us an opportunity in the future to change for the better. At the moment I don’t think Berry’s “alternative” is a solution that has any chance of solving things. We need time, and technology is the only thing short of a higher power that can buy us it.
Perhaps my greatest disappointment with The World-Ending Fire, though, is just how few essays describing Berry’s own life on his farm are included. To his credit Paul Kingsnorth’s essay choices are mostly well considered, but this omission is in no way minor. It amounts to a grave fault in the book’s structure. We spend three hundred and fifty pages listening to Berry praise his life without really getting a sense of what that life is. How can we trust him without that? The essays that I enjoyed most in The World-Ending Fire were not those that told me how to live, but rather showed me how I could live. “A Few Words for Motherhood” is a beautiful rumination on the beginning of an animal’s life, while the final essay, “The Rise”, uses a narrative of canoeing down the Kentucky River as a way of thinking about pollution and limits.
It is these essays that I will remember and read again, and not those that are purely diatribes.
Conclusion
My criticism of The World-Ending Fire does not mean I did not like it. I would not have read the whole book if I hadn’t found such enjoyment in it. Berry is a wise man, and a kind one. His words and values are things that I hold close to my heart, and I think that others ought to hear what he has to say. I will be picking up this book again, not to find something new, but to find something old. I will flick through it in search of a reminder of who I ought to be and how I ought to live.
“Every man is followed by a shadow which is his death – dark, featureless, and mute. And for every man there is a place where his shadow is clarified and is made his reflection, where his face is mirrored in the ground. He sees his source and his destiny, and they are acceptable to him. He becomes a follower of what pursued him. What hounded his track becomes his companion.”
These are powerful words for an unoriginal idea, but they are words I will carry with me going forward as I try to follow my own calling. Nothing in The World-Ending Fire is original, as Berry freely admits. But original or unoriginal, the knowledge contained in these essays is valuable and not known nearly widely enough. It is a guide to a life that is better, more sustainable, more filled with grace. One day I hope to live it.