Wendell Berry's "2007, VII."

Thoughts on the harder kind of looking.

VII.

In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there,
watching for himself to return.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.


from Leavings (Counterpoint, 2010)

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I can’t believe it has taken me so long to write about Wendell Berry’s work, which I admire so deeply for its moral clarity. I think it has taken me so long because it is — and perhaps will always be — nearly impossible to distill my thoughts about Berry’s work into an essay about a single poem. It is this poem I am thinking about today, but I could very nearly be thinking of this one, “Like Snow,” that opens Berry’s Leavings:

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.

Or perhaps this one, “2008, XII.,” from the same book, which begins with these lines:

We forget the land we stand on
and live from.

And ends with these:

This is our riddle
to which the answer is a life
that none of us has lived.

Admittedly, it is also difficult to write about Berry because his moral clarity is so entirely his own. What I mean by that is that Berry is radically his own self, a true dissenter, someone whose opinions have given me access to a liberatory and imaginative language and permission to be my own self, to debate and discuss and cement my own values. As Jedediah Britton-Purdy writes of Berry in The Nation:

Over the years, he has called himself an agrarian, a pacifist, and a Christian—albeit of an eccentric kind. He has written against all forms of violence and destruction—of land, communities, and human beings—and argued that the modern American way of life is a skein of violence. He is an anti-capitalist moralist and a writer of praise for what he admires: the quiet, mostly uncelebrated labor and affection that keep the world whole and might still redeem it.

This is what I love of Berry — his radical imagination that is so peaceful in scope — a desire to live locally and critique globally, to write over and over again about what it means to love the land and to love people, and to rage against all who push back against this so-seemingly simple ethos. And yet Berry is still someone who — at times — I disagree with, particularly given his slightly traditional and conservative bent towards the family structure, a sometimes-reduction of the Christian morality he has spent his life expanding and reimagining.

Still, I’ve always found Berry’s definition of life as one that is “mortal, partial, fallible, complexly dependent, entailing many responsibilities toward ourselves, our places, and our fellow beings” as perhaps the truest definition of life I’ve encountered. It is one I hold close. I don’t ever want to forget that we are mortal or partial or fallible or dependent. If I do forget such things, I think I’d lose my love and my patience, whatever it is about myself that I hold close.

Berry ends that definition above (this is from The World-Ending Fire) by writing: “Above all, [life] understands itself as limited.”

It is that emphasis on limitation that guides today’s poem. It is there in the final three lines:

But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.

In his book, What Are People For, Berry has a sentence I love. It reads, simply: “In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.” It is a sentence that gets at the consequences of both capitalism and a belief in ever-expanding unlimited possibility with a succinct and clear notion — that this, all of this, whatever it is we are doing here, denies us our ability to rest, and to recognize, through our resting, our limitation, and, by virtue of that, our humanity, and, by virtue of that, our place in the world, which is a shared world.

That sentence I quoted above comes after a recognition of Berry’s love for the forest. He is — I imagine — always walking in his essays, always moving somewhere slowly through the world, as he is in today’s poem, dotted as it is with the “lifelong fields” and “the streams he has walked beside.” And I think what is funny is that some, I imagine, might view Berry’s stern criticality as something that deprives him of pleasure. But I don’t think that is the case. I think that there is a real lovely subversion that Berry performs here in today’s poem, a subversion that sets forth the values of humility and limitation while still recognizing a real sense of pleasure in an adherence to such values.

In today’s poem, the man who has walked beside the streams and through the fields of his life looks back at such moments with fondness:

he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there

He misses himself in those places. There’s fondness there.

Missing, if you can believe it, is — or can be — a positive emotion. There is joy involved in missing, I think. Right now, as I type this, I am looking at the water off the shore of Massachusetts, and I am thinking of a time, years ago, when, on a windy and cold morning, my wife and I walked along Plum Island Beach. The wind was whirling off the coast and two surfers were bobbing in the waves and a dog was off its leash and my wife held a shell to her eye and looked at me through it and the color of her iris was the same color as a rock that Winslow Homer might paint, sea-grey, sea-blue, like an ocean crashing over a shore, and right now I miss myself in that moment. It is no longer here; it can never be. I have disappeared from that place, but I am here, where I am, remembering it with love. So yes; there can be joy in the missing.

And there is joy in this poem today. Look again at those final three lines:

But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.

The man’s disappearance is foreseen not just with hope, but also with thanks. This joy is part of the radical subversion that today’s poem offers, one that reminds me of Berry’s assertion that we “must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us.”

In a world that devalues humility and the recognition of one’s fragility and limitation, “disappearing” from the world is an act viewed with an almost-religious sense of fear. It is to be avoided at all costs. But Berry redirects our gaze back toward the word with a real sense of all its possibility. To disappear is not to forget but rather to remember. It is to remember what the world teaches us, which is that we share in all of this, that we mark and are marked by an interdependence of actions, a hand-holding across our lives. When we disappear, whenever we do, it is because we let go of that faulty relationship with permanence and exchange it for one of impermanence; we remember again that we are frail and dependent, that we have been places and that such places were and still are places filled with others, whether those others are friends or relatives or trees or good fucking dogs; we let go because we can say that was good; I don’t have to keep holding on. We don’t have to keep holding on, asserting ourselves in the places where we are no longer. We don’t have to control every last thing. We can let ourselves miss parts of this life with joy. Miss in both senses of the word: to remember with love, and to be absent from. Yes, we can let others come.

And yes, speaking of joy, here’s a Berry poem — “Why” — that I adore:

Why all the embarrassment 
about being happy?
Sometimes I'm as happy
as a sleeping dog,
and for the same reasons,
and for others.

But on another note, I’d be remiss to say that perhaps the reason I am thinking so much about Berry is because I often find myself needing his example of moral clarity and courage. I need it now, certainly. I need it as I witness what continues to happen to the people of Gaza, and as I try to make an effort to maintain my act of witness there, despite distraction or manipulation or whatever else gets in the way. “Whether we and our politicians know it or not,” Berry writes, “Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” I wonder, then, who is on the side of nature in these times. Who more closely values what nature values. Because that, Berry has taught me, is probably where justice is most deserved.

In his poem, “Give It Time,” Berry says this more bluntly and assertively, using the image of a river:

The river is of the earth
and it is free. It is rigorously
embanked and bound,
and yet is free. “To hell
with restraint,” it says.
“I have got to be going.”
It will grind out its dams.
It will go over or around them.
They will become little pieces.

I am thinking of all of this because, as I am still thinking of the war on Gaza, I have found myself thinking, too, of the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was kidnapped by Israeli forces and only just released. In a feature in Democracy Now, Abu Toha is quoted as saying:

I only have a Palestinian passport, which is really not very helpful when I leave Gaza — if I could leave Gaza. … So, where do we go? And Netanyahu, on the second day of the escalation, asked the Palestinians in Gaza to leave. He said, “Leave now.” But where do we leave, and why should we leave? We have nowhere else to go.

In 2021, after airstrikes on Gaza, Abu Toha wrote a piece in The Nation titled “In Gaza, It’s Now Time to Count our Family Members.” It begins with this paragraph:

Thursday evening, Egypt brokered a cease-fire between Israeli and Hamas that would start Friday at 2 AM. When that precise time came, thousands of Gazans marched into the streets, streets they haven’t walked in 11 days. I think they were celebrating not victory but survival.

I think of how both of these final lines — we have nowhere else to go, and celebrating not victory but survival — are in conversation with the final line of today’s poem: let others come. Such a statement feels at once political and personal. I think that those in Gaza are suffering the ongoing consequences of what happens when others — particularly those in positions of power, those in positions of privilege, those who have benefitted from imperialist or colonialist or capitalist interests — do not let others come, or do not, even more simply, let others live. As Berry reminds me, we have so much not just to learn from nature, but also to be reminded of through observing nature. We have so much to let go of that is unnatural to nature itself. The desire for unlimited conquest, I know, can be unnatural. Power. Greed. Consumption. We have made so much of this life we pursue seem natural, and yet it is killing us, and it is also killing others.

That, I think, is the difficulty (and value) of reading someone with the moral consistency, clarity, and courage of Berry. What his work points me toward seems so simple, and so right, and yet, when I look away, I remember how easy it is to live unnaturally, to live in distraction, in loneliness, in privilege, in a state of endless consumption and greed. “You can best serve civilization,” Berry writes, “by being against what usually passes for it.” To live a life rooted in that position of constant dissent — well, it is hard. It situates you, almost immediately, in a position of at-first-solitude, before you find your companions in solidarity. To position yourself in this way is to be reminded of the ease that society can create for us, and the ongoing damage that can occur as a result of that ease. I want to have the courage to turn back from that ease, to do the harder looking, and to keep doing this — this looking closer and more closely, to wonder, to imagine, to dream, and to hope — for as long as I can. To let others come, and to let others live.

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Some Notes:

1. As for some reading this week in relation to the ongoing war on Gaza — I found this open letter written in New York Review of Books to be powerful and informative. And, too, the aforementioned feature in Democracy Now on Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet abducted in Gaza who was only recently freed.

2. Here’s another single sentence by Berry that I am thinking of today:

   Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

3. As I mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.