The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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      The Art of Loading Brush

      Copyright © 2017 by Wendell Berry

      First paperback edition: 2019

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      This book contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used imaginatively.

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

      Names: Berry, Wendell, 1934– author.

      Title: The art of loading brush : new agrarian writings / Wendell Berry.

      Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017034645 | ISBN 9781619020382 (alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture—United States. | Agriculture—Social aspects—United States.

      Classification: LCC S441 .B46 2017 | DDC 338.10973—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034645

      Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-158-0

      Cover design by Nicole Caputo

      Book design by Tabitha Lahr

      COUNTERPOINT

      2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

      Berkeley, CA 94710

      www.counterpointpress.com

      Printed in the United States of America

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

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      This book is indebted, as most of my books have been, to my conversation with my brother, John Marshall Berry, Jr. That conversation began in earnest half a century ago and ended just a few days before he died on October 27, 2016.

      Our conversation remained from beginning to end under the influence of our father, of his devotion to farming, of his work in behalf of the small farmers of our region, and of our conversation with him.

      That conversation was taken up many years ago between Tanya Berry and me. It continues between us and our children and their children.

      This is the conversation of agrarians and agrarianism, far larger, older, and longer than our family or any family can remember, involving some people we know, and many we don’t know.

      I dedicate this book to that conversation and to all of its members, once, now, and to come.

      You had to be here then to be able to don’t see it and don’t hear it now. But I was here then, and I don’t see it now . . .

      —Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men

      . . . our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life . . .

      —C. S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” Selected Literary Essays

      My view is that all artists, whether they know it or not, whether they would repudiate the notion or not, are in fact “showers forth” of things which tend to be impoverished, or misconceived, or altogether lost or willfully set aside in the preoccupations of our present intense technological phase, but which, none the less, belong to man.

      So that when asked to what end does my work proceed I can do no more than answer . . . thus: Perhaps it is in the maintenance of some sort of single plank in some sort of bridge.

      —David Jones, The Dying Gaul

      We are responsible for what we remember.

      —John Lukacs, СКАЧАТЬ