“Now You Know The Worst”: Wendell Berry’s Commencement Apologia

by Dana Nichols

A region so often
described as Christ-haunted and guilt-chastened has regularly produced writers
and intellectuals who are concerned with more than sentimental portrayals of
the South or chauvinistic myth-making.[1] Many literary figures of the South have looked,
over the years with eyes clear of fear and nostalgia, regarding their region’s past
and future. They have sought to illuminate pressing issues that trouble the region,
not only violence and racial prejudice but also pollution and the exploitation
of the natural world. Leading the way is Kentuckian Wendell Berry who has struggled with issues of land,
race, and poverty, the South’s endemic and enduring qualities, and in
commencement speeches, he encourages the new generation to take up the fight.

By
the time Centre College in Danville, Kentucky invited him to speak at its June
1978 commencement, Wendell Berry had already published fourteen poetry collections,
six non-fiction books, and three novels,[2] an
impressive body of work that earned him a reputation for defending rural farm
culture and for eloquently warning of the moral and spiritual consequences of
alienation from this culture. When he took the podium, he acknowledged the trite
tradition of commencement remarks but also recognized the benefits of such a
custom, saying, "the same truths are told in one form or another to every
generation. Inexperience doubts them as it must, as perhaps it should, and
experience proves them true; the benefits being that the old truths thus remain
fresh, and each new generation thus learns something about humility." The "old
truth" that Berry conveys in this brief speech at Centre College’s 1978
graduation is "the inescapability of connections and of dependences,"
emphasizing that we are all part of a divine order "that we did not make, that
we cannot finally comprehend, that includes and sustains our lives, and that we
cannot too radically change without destroying ourselves" (Centre Speech 1).

This
notion of an interconnected and ordered community has long appeared in Berry’s poetry. As
Morris Grubbs and David Abner explain in their article "Helping Us to See:
Wendell Berry and the Community of Creation," Berry’s canon "is concerned with the local
and far-reaching effects of humanity’s increasing attempts to divorce itself
from the natural world" (44). "The Farmer among the Tombs" (1970), for
instance, suggests that, according to the natural cycle, death should beget
life: "I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,/ their headstones
standing shoulder to shoulder,/ the bones imprisoned under them./ Plow up the
graveyards! Haul off the monuments!/ Pry open the vaults and the coffins/ so
the dead may nourish their graves/ and go free, their acres traversed all
summer/ by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees" (Collected Poems 105). The same sentiment is echoed in "Enriching
the Earth" (1970), in which Berry describes plowing "in the seeds/ of winter
grains and of various legumes,/ their growth to be plowed in to enrich the
earth," and the farmer stirred "into the ground the offal/ and the decay of the
growth of past seasons/ and so mended the earth and made its yield increase" (Collected Poems 110). The poem ends with
the assertion that "after death, willing or not, the body serves,/ entering the
earth. And so what was heaviest/ and most mute is at last raised up into song"
(Collected Poems 110). In these
poems, as in his commencement talk, Berry’s
message is that any interference with nature’s birth-growth-death-decay-rebirth
cycle will negatively impact the environment, and by extension, the human life
that exists within it.  

Speaking near the
end of a decade of unprecedented waste and profit-minded exploitation,[3]
Wendell Berry specifically stresses the human aspect of interconnectedness in this
commencement address. He contends:

So great is the magnitude of the
order of Creation that no one ever understands the ultimate cause or foresees
the ultimate consequence of any act. The human meaning of this is that we are
not, have never been, can never be, alone. There is clearly some comfort in
that. But I hope I am making equally clear the difficulty and even the
fearfulness that also are in it. No one can act simply in his or her own
behalf. (Centre Speech 2)

As Thomas Strawman has pointed out,
Berry’s
written works also demonstrate "how modern technology’s ability to place the
individual outside the natural cycles and responsibilities of life may actually
work to vitiate the highest goal of the humanistic tradition, namely individual
freedom and the fulfillment of each person’s highest potential" (56). In an
essay entitled "The Tyranny of Charity," published in The Long-Legged House (1969), Berry had approached this same issue
through an intimate look at a poverty-stricken furniture maker living in "the
coal country of East Kentucky in the summer of 1965" (4). Though incredibly
gifted in his craft and a successful farmer to boot, the furniture maker lives
on "the most meager home site imaginable, starkly and heavily ugly, sterile and
coal-stained and raw" (4). Coming upon the dismal scene, Berry reacts in such a
way as to suggest that humanity, like the flora and fauna of the natural world,
is inextricably connected, one to another: "Getting out of the car there at the
edge of the road, standing up to face that black yard and the bitter shambles
of a house, you are inclined to forget the good you know of the place, and to
be overcome by a foreboding of hopelessness that by being theirs is also
mysteriously yours" (5).

In this essay,
too, Berry suggests that the furniture maker’s plight is the result of the modern
American way of life, that his wares are rejected because they do not bear
traditional marks of machine mass-produced distinction, such as "Broyhill," "La-Z-Boy,"
or "Chippendales." In spite of their non-designer status, the furniture maker’s chairs are certainly the strongest
and best-made of their kind I  know of.
They are beautifully proportioned and balanced. Such ornamentation as is used is
modest, and tasteful in a way that transcends fashionableness. They are made to
last a lifetime and more, and their strength is achieved without expense of
grace. It is hard to think of a room, rich or poor, that would not be dignified
by the presence of one of them. (7)

And yet the Kentucky craftsman cannot sell enough chairs
to afford to send his daughter to school with ice cream money. Thus, "The
Tyranny of Charity" attacks the gluttonous appetite for machine-produced goods
- for MORE of everything – driving the consumers of this time period.

In his remarks to Centre College
graduates, Berry
speaks to the evils of gluttony. Near the end of his speech, Berry states,

Gluttony is not sinful merely
because it consumes too much and leaves too little for others; it is also
sinful because it belittles what it consumes, and belittles the source: ‘. . .
swinish gluttony/ Ne’er looks to Heaven amidst his gorgeous feast . . .’ That
is John Milton, writing in 1634 a perfectly apt criticism of the ‘consumer
society’ of the 1970’s. Gluttony gives only the soon-jaded pleasure of the
little we can consume; temperance gives the joy of inconsumable abundance. (Centre
Speech 3)

The belittling nature of gluttony
included in Berry’s
commencement remarks is addressed also in the beginning of Remembering (1988). In this short novel, Andy Catlett has a
nightmare in which a great causeway had been built
across the creek valley where he lives, the heavy roadbed and its supports a
materialized obliviousness to his house and barn that stood belittled nearby,
as if great Distance itself had come to occupy that place. Bulldozers pushed
and trampled the loosened, disformed, denuded earth, working it like dough
toward some new shape entirely human-conceived. The place was already unrecognizable
except for the small house and barn destined to be enrubbled with all the rest
that had been there. Watching, Andy knew that all the last remnants of old
forest, the chief beauty and dignity of that place, were now fallen and gone.
(122)

And worse still, Andy comes face to
face with "swinish gluttony" personified: "a fat man sat behind a desk, eating
the living flesh of his own forearm, all the while making a speech in a tone of
pleading reasonableness. ‘I have to do this, I am starving. Three meals a day are not
enough’" (122-123). Berry’s
message, whether delivered in a fictional tale or a matter-of-fact oratory,
warns of turning good farm land and green spaces into wastelands stripped of
beauty and fertility by wastefulness or overindulgence of profit-seekers like
the fat man of Andy’s subconscious. Reducing the problem to a simple but valid
equation, the poem "We Live by Mercy if we Live" sums up the situation as Berry sees it: "Cost +
greed – fear = price" (Timbered Choir
191).

With a statement that
links him to his audience, Wendell Berry concludes his brief remarks to the Centre
College graduates: "And so, as it has been for many another graduating class,
the old is news for this one of 1978, of which I am honored to count myself a
member" (Centre Speech).

Eleven years later
when he speaks at the College of the Atlantic[4] (COA)
in Bar Harbor, Maine, Wendell Berry seeks again to link
himself and members of his generation with the young graduates. He explains the
purpose of his remarks:

It is conventional at graduation
exercises to congratulate the graduates. Though I am honored beyond expression
by your invitation to speak to you today, and though my good wishes for your
future could not be more fervent, I think I will refrain from congratulations.
This, after all, is your commencement, and a beginning is the wrong time for
congratulations. Also I know enough by now of the performance of my own
generation that I look at your generation with some skepticism and some
anxiety. I hope that in fifty years, having looked back at the lives that you
are now commencing, your children and grandchildren will congratulate you. What
I want to attempt today is to say something useful about the problems and
opportunities that lie ahead of your generation and mine. (COA Speech)

And again he stresses the interdependent
nature of the world, saying "no place on earth can be completely healthy until
all places are" (COA Speech).

With a few
omissions for brevity’s sake and some noteworthy additions, Berry’s words in 1989 are virtually a verbatim
rendering of an essay entitled "Word and Flesh" that would be published in What Are People for? (1990). In this
essay as well as his 1989 graduation remarks, Berry argues that esoteric
rhetoric and abstractions fail at provoking any substantial and valuable
change. He tells the College of the Atlantic graduates, for instance, to beware
the word "planetary," the latest buzzword of the environmental movement:
"Nobody can do anything to heal a planet. The suggestion that anybody could do
so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their white
horses to save the planet – and they keep falling off in front of the
grandstand" (COA Speech). The same warning, in fact the same image of the
ineffectual white knight, appears in "Word and Flesh."

In addition, this
essay laments the fact that years of rhetoric have inspired few positives: "Though
we have been talking about most of our problems for decades, we are still
mainly talking. The civil rights
movement has not given us better communities. The women’s movement has not
given us better marriages or better households. The environment movement has
not changed our parasitic relationship to nature" (199). For the 1989
graduation speech, Berry
includes a sentence missing from the published essay. It further accentuates the
failure of mere rhetoric: "Though we have been talking about most of our
problems for decades, we are still mainly talking about them. We have failed to produce the necessary
examples of better ways [my italics].The civil rights movement has not
given us better communities. The women’s movement has not given us better
marriages or better households. The environment movement has not changed our
parasitic relationship to nature" (COA Speech).

Most importantly, in
both the speech and the essay, Berry
makes it clear that Nature will exact her own revenge if we fail to heed her
signs. Interpreting for Gaia, the name applied to a once unified mother earth, Berry
states: "Now she is plainly saying to us: ‘If you put the fates of whole
communities or cities or regions or ecosystems at risk in single ships or
factories or power plants, then I will furnish the drunk[5]
or the fool or the imbecile who will make the necessary small mistake.’" Berry’s published essay concludes on this ominous note,
but the College of the Atlantic graduation talk continues with some advice that
is deceptively simple and devoid of the esoteric rhetoric that Berry deems ineffective.
Hoping to provoke change through responsible action and awareness, Berry winds up his
remarks:

And so, graduates, my advice to
you is simply my hope for us all: Beware the justice of Nature; Understand that
there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature, or in defiance of
Nature; Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits
of human intelligence and responsibility. We humans are not smart enough or
conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale; Make
a home; Help to make a community; Be loyal to what you have made; Put the
interest of the community first; Love your neighbors – not the neighbors you
pick out, but the ones you have; Love this miraculous world that we did not
make, that is a gift to us; So far as you are able, make your lives independent
of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage; Find work, if you can, that
does no damage; Enjoy your work; Work well. (COA Speech)

Though he arms his
audience for an uncertain future with this advice, Wendell Berry’s messages at
Centre College in 1978 and at the College of the Atlantic in 1989 recall the cheerless
opening lines of his 1995 poem "Now You Know the Worst:" "Now you know the
worst/ we humans have to know/ about ourselves, and I am sorry,/ for I know
that you will be afraid" (Timbered Choir
192).

In
his entire body of work, Wendell Berry seeks to dispel the myth of existence. For
him, the most dangerous myth of existence is that one region may be exploited
and given up to harm without causing harm to befall other people and places. Berry speaks against
fear – the fear of giving up abusive environmental behavior. Fear makes
needless enemies, stifles dissent, and retards empathy for others and thus true
understanding of ourselves and the world. Odd sentiments, perhaps, from a loyal
son of the land behind the "Magnolia Curtain." 

NOTES

[1] Chapter
title quote is taken from Wendell Berry’s Timbered
Choir (192).

[2] Novels
published prior to 1978 are Nathan
Coulter (1960, reissued 1985); A
Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983); The
Memory of Old Jack (1974, revised 2001). Poetry collections
published prior to 1978 are November twenty six nineteen hundred sixty three
(1964); The Broken Ground (1964); Findings (1968); Openings (1968); Farming: A Hand Book (1970); The Country of Marriage (1973); An
Eastward Look (1974); Horses
(1974); Sayings and Doings (1975); To What Listens (1975); The Kentucky River (1976); There Is Singing Around Me (1976); Clearing (1977); Three Memorial Poems (1977). Berry non-fiction essay collections
published prior to 1978 are The Rise
(1968); The Long-Legged House (1969, 2004); The
Hidden Wound (1970); The
Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge (1971, revised
1991); A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural
(1972, 2004); The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
(1977, 1978, 1986).

[3] Although
both the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration were established by President Nixon in 1970, their
recommendations and legislations proved toothless, failing to rein in
profit-seekers who disregarded environmental health. Throughout the decade, for
instance, Brazilian rain forests are decimated, and negligent strip mining in
the Virginias and Kentucky leave lands pocked and depleted.
And in the name of profit, several damaging oil accidents marred the
late-1970s. In 1976, for example, a significant oil spill occurs off the coast
of Spain, and a Liberian
tanker crashes only 27 miles off Nantucket
Island, leaking nine
million gallons of oil. The Amoco Cadiz wrecks in 1978 off the coast of France,
losing 68 million gallons of oil (six times the amount of the Exxon Valdez
spill) and producing an oil slick that ultimately covers 110 miles of
coastline. And most frightening of all, an investigation of some unusual health
problems in children living in the Love
Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New
York reveals that the children’s ailments are the
direct result of exposure to toxic waste dumped on site in the 1940s and 1950s.

[4] On its
web page, COA boasts its "curriculum with a conscience," and declares that "COA
is geared to understanding the relationships between humans and our
environ-ments. Even more important, students and faculty expect to do
something to improve those relationships - in policy, in art, in science,
and in a multitude of fields that defy categorization. We call this quest
Human Ecology. It is the one degree that all COA graduates receive"
(http://www.coa.edu/html/about.htm). With this in mind, Wendell Berry seems a
particularly inspired choice for commencement speaker; however, it should be
noted, too, that Berry
did not shape his remarks to match COA’s curriculum goals, but rather had
spoken of human-environment relationships as early as 1978.

[5] Berry alludes here to Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of
the Exxon Valdez who admitted to consuming three alcoholic beverages before
boarding ship and striking a reef in Prince William Sound
in March 1989. This accident dumped 11,000,000 gallons of crude oil into the
Sound, costing over $2 billion in clean-up and uncountable wildlife death.
Speaking in June 1989, Berry
no doubt had this catastrophe fresh in his mind.

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell.  A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems,
1979-1997.  New York: Counterpoint,  1998.

—.  Another Turn of the Crank.  New
York: 
Counterpoint,  1996.

—.  "Centre College
Commencement Address."  Personal
Copy.  Danville, KY.  June 1978.

—. Collected Poems,
1957-1982.  New
York:  North Point
P,  1987.

—.  "College of the
Atlantic Commencement Address."  Personal
Copy.  Bar Harbor, ME, 
June 1989.

—.  The Long-Legged House.  Washington,
D.C.:  Shoemaker Hoard,  2004.

—.  Remembering.  New
York:  North
Point,  1988.

—.  What Are People For?.  New
York:  North
Point,  1990.

Grubbs, Morris and David Abner.  "Helping Us to See: Wendell Berry and the Community" of Creation.  Kentucky English Bulletin  45:1. 
1995:  43-59. 

Strawman, Thomas. 
"‘Futurology’ and the Fruit of Industrialism in Bellamy, Schiller, and Wendell Berry: Physical
Comfort, Spiritual Regression?"  Midwestern Quarterly
32  (1990):  44-65.

Whited, Stephen.  "On
Devotion to the ‘Communal Order’: Wendell Berry’s Record of Fidelity, Interdependence, and
Love." Studies in the Literary Imagination 
27.2 (Fall 1994): 9-28.