|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
Inescapably Human
| Article
# : |
17494 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
3,100 Words |
| Author
: |
Marion Montgomery
Marion Montgomery's most recent books are Liberal Arts and
Community and Virtue and Modern Shadows of Turning. He also
has authored four works of fiction, three volumes of poetry,
and numerous books of criticism. |
WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?
Wendell Berry
San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990
214 pp., $19.95 paper
Wendell Berry's What Are People For? is a unified book disguised as a collection of occasional pieces: review essays of books most of which are no doubt now out of print, a consideration of "The Pleasure of Eating" and "The Work of Local Culture," and the like. There is a consideration of "The Responsibility of the Poet."
Berry's book might well be described as meditations upon abiding questions. He ponders the inescapable human condition: Fallible man must contend with his responsibilities, which requires coming to terms with his own particular, limited gifts. Our author is poet, teacher, farmer, husband, father, citizen. His acceptance of these several callings accounts for the range of his meditations. But always the singular presence: Wendell Berry, intent upon a proper homage to the things of creation.
Homage to Creation
In this light, Berry weighs the autobiography of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper, Nate Shaw. One feels in both men "the energy of passionate knowledge," which speaks through a "language under the discipline of experience, not the discipline of experience, not the discipline of ideas or rules." Berry must object, then, that Shaw's story has come to print through an editor who does not grasp his life. Even so, the sharecropper's use of names is so proximate to the things
... (1999 of 18022 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
