The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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      Preface*

      by Maurice Telleen (in absentia)

      Whatever agrarianism is, it is too important to be a mere movement.

      ・・・

      Movements, almost by definition, are compelled to be certain or “right.” So it is not surprising that they tend to be self-righteous. In addition to being right they are convinced of both their inevitability and their superiority. The latter confers an aura of both practicality and pragmatism on them. Movements leave little room for meaningful dissent. They regard themselves as destiny. Movements are big on tunnel vision. Their tunnel. Their vision. So, let us agrarians give thanks that we are not part of a certified and accredited movement.

      ・・・

      Agrarianism’s natural home is the field, the garden, the stable, the prairie, the forest, the tribe, or the village . . . and the cottage rather than the castle. So it is little wonder that most contemporary Americans are strangers to the term, the concept, and the geography.

      ・・・

      One reason, I believe, for its being ignored is that agrarianism isn’t just about money. It might get a more respectful hearing if it were. But it is about culture, just as agriculture was about culture. Before it got run into the ditch by agribusiness.

      A funny thing about cultures is that they produce people who understand more than they know. Sort of like osmosis. So the old agrarians, to get back to our subject, knew a lot about local soil, local weather, local crops, animal behavior, and each other. They depended on each other. It almost defines that much abused word, provincial. It was very provincial and no doubt carried a load of both inertia and foolishness, along with wisdom.

      But whatever the mix, it was rooted in places, communities, continuity, and people whose names and faces you knew. As a matrix, it worked reasonably well. Which is different from claiming that it was idyllic and completely satisfactory.

      Introduction

      I

      This book, like several others I have written, is intended as a part of a public conversation about the relationship of our lives, and of our communal and economic life, to the lands we live from. That no such public conversation exists presently, or has existed for the last sixty or seventy years, has never been, and is not now, an obstacle to my “contribution.”

      Tanya Berry, my wife, says that my principal asset as a writer has been my knack for repeating myself. That insight has instructed and amused me very much, because she is right and so forthrightly right. It is true that my writings have often repeated certain movements of thought, which, as I must hope, have been made clearer by being repeated in changes of perception and context.

      So far as I am able to name them, those habitual movements of thought, at least some of them, are as follows:

      As I look back over my work of several decades, I can see that the back-and-forth of my thoughts has hardly been graceful, as it is hardly graceful in these present pages. It will probably have to be seen as a struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.

      II

      From my college years, when I first encountered the word, I have understood myself and my native culture as “agrarian.” In my writing and conversation I have often used that word, assuming, no doubt too confidently, that others understood it more or less as I did. But political circumstances, a number of “opinion pieces” in newspapers and magazines, and my own recent work as represented here have put me under pressure to define “agrarianism” as fully and exactly as I can.

      I was first alerted to the need for this by a young professor’s article in a magazine of “ecocriticism,” in which he questioned the “acceptability” of my writing in view of my avowed indebtedness to I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays by “Twelve Southerners,” sometimes known as “southern agrarians,” which was published in 1930. My “ecocritic” assumed that any book published in 1930 by southerners would be necessarily a racist book, and that I and my writings, because of my acknowledgement of my debt, were necessarily racist as well. Those assumptions are fairly explicit. Others are implied: that agrarianism and racism are only southern; that only southerners were racists in 1930; that if a racist espouses agrarianism, then agrarianism is racist; that my own agrarianism could have come only from the “southern agrarians” and I’ll Take My Stand.

      The “ecocritical” charge of racism, though I would discount it as trivial, cannot be discounted as harmless. The problem with several of the isms now prominently condemned is what we might call flypaper justice: the impossibility, once accused of a categorical offense such as racism or sexism, of establishing one’s categorical innocence. The Accuser, in these instances, is a subtler serpent than the Tempter. I am sure that some at least of the Twelve Southerners were born, as in fact I was, into a circumstance of racism that they merely accepted until the time when they were obliged consciously to deal with it. For example: СКАЧАТЬ