Wendell Berry & The Art of Belonging

Wendell Berry passed away this past weekend at the age of 92. He died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky — a fitting end for a man who spent his life asking what it means to belong to a place, a community, one’s work, and to the created world. Berry’s subject was ostensibly agriculture, but his questions were much larger: What do we owe the places we inhabit? What makes for work good? What happens when we forget that we are creatures?

Berry lived over five decades farming, writing, teaching, and thinking about those questions. He became one of the most influential American critics of modern industrial society. Not because he rejected modern life wholesale, but because he feared what we might lose in our pursuit of efficiency, convenience, mobility, and endless economic growth. His answer was not that everyone should become a farmer or that everyone must spend his life where he was born. It was that we should learn how to belong.

It would be easy to reduce Berry’s philosophy to a command to stay put. Stay on the farm. Stay in your hometown. Resist the mobility of modern America. But people move, circumstances change, opportunities arise, families grow, and sometimes leaving is necessary. There is nothing inherently virtuous about remaining in one geographic location for one’s entire life. A man can leave his childhood home without abandoning everything that made it home in the first place.