Wendell Berry wandered into view sometime in the late 70's or early 80's. I remember that George Waguespack (newly hired Dean of Students at Mt. Carmel High School, Houston) was always reading (and trying to interest me in) odd, mysterio- philosophical things by Nietzsche and Pirsig and Castaneda - and one day he gave me a thick bundle of photocopied pages. I can hear his cajun tones "You should read this - I think you'll like this guy." It was an essay called "The Body and The Earth." Thanks, George.

Later I found it as a chapter of The Unsettling of America. It begins,

"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 within this world."

I liked his careful argument (if argument it can be called) about the need for a balanced life, conscious of its own roots. He provoked a sad and certain outrage over the way the world has gone and why it has gone that way. He amazed me with his attention to the rich agri-cultural symbolism of the marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope. More than intelligence sprang from these pages; this was the voice of a man who had lived and was living these things.

So. I first came to Wendell Berry through his essays (Recollected Essays 1965-1980 also contains "The Body and the Earth"). I also knew he was a poet, but I was too tangled up with the wild city poets to listen much to him. (Lately I've been trying to catch up.)

Then I ran into his fiction - first, I think, through The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership. That sub-title struck me as odd, but there was no mystery by the end of those tales. These people belonged to each other in many obvious and subtle ways. They were bound by blood and circumstance and the land. By the end of those tales, I knew that Berry was (through this fiction) laying out the life that had bred his essays. These people (Feltners, Coulters, Catletts, Keiths) will come to inhabit your thought and your life.

The fiction is a living stream; jump in anywhere. I am right close to finishing the most recent novel Jayber Crow. It would be a good starting point, but the best might be A Place on Earth or Nathan Coulter - no, anywhere you choose will be just fine. The scope is epic...told in tiny ways...a short story here, a novel there.

If you want to know about some immense (and not always so healthy) transformations of 20th century American culture, these are essential books.

If you have ever wondered about your own place in the hugeness of Creation, they'll give you plenty to think about, too.

Actually, I don't know if you'll like this work or not. But his thoughts - and by extension some part of his world - have been travelling with me for the past twenty years. In some ways, his world is more real to me than many parts of my own world - and sheds a useful light on many parts of my own world. Isn't this what we hope to find in a great writer?