Wendell Berry On Happiness As A Resilient Force And The Key To Strong Purity In Times Of Trouble – The Marginalian

“I have always been at odds with this country not only about race but about the standards in which it seems to live,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead when they sat together to rethink democracy in a consumerist world. A generation later, poet, farmer, and steward of nature Wendell Berry – a poet in the great Baldwinian sense – took up the controversy that grew over time in his small, high-spirited book. A Hidden Wound (public library) to offer, without looking away from its scarred realities, the healing and reconciliation of the resistance to the culture where our joy of life is taken from us due to the lack of an empty heart to buy, and then sold to us at the price of the latest product, and sold at a discriminatory price along the lines of great income inequality.

Berry writes:

It occurs to me that, for a man whose life from the beginning has been dominated by the lives of black people, there is little surprising I can say about them in my other writings. Perhaps this is justified – there is no need for the author to deal with any topic – but it is an avoidance. When I wrote about them before I felt that I was doing more than marking, leaving a space, which I would have to return to and fill. For whatever reasons, good or bad, I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I knew from long ago that it is a wound – a historical wound, which was prepared in the past centuries to live in me at my birth as a genetic disease, and to be widened and deepened by my life.

Berry recounts growing up around a black man named Nick, who worked for Berry's grandfather. Nick, to whom I dedicate this book, was a blessing to be around during Berry's formative years – a hard-working man with a full vision and an unusually happy mind. A young child befriended a large fifty-something man with the zeal of a chosen and bloodless kinship. Berry recalls her love for Nick with a fondness that cannot be diminished by the passage of decades:

One of my two or three greatest desires was to be with him… I caught his steps. Such a loyal fan, and as young and self-important and energetic as I am, I must have been a temptation to him. But he did not lose patience.

This bond had a profound effect on Berry as a writer and person, shaping both his poetry and the personality that emerged from it. He shows:

The great benefit of my childhood friendship with Nick… was not the experience of empathy, though that was involved and important, but a deep and long-lasting connection with lives and minds unlike my own, and unlike any I knew as a white child among white adults. They do not appear in my memory and my thoughts about them as objects of pity, but rather as friends and teachers, ancestors so to speak, ancestors of certain species that are important to my thinking.

From Nick, who had worked hard since childhood for the smallest salary and had very little hope of living in any other way, Berry learned one of the hardest, most beautiful truths about living a rich life – a kind of meditation that exists to incline the mind, regardless of physical conditions, to happiness. A century after Hermann Hesse placed those present in the small joys of life at the center of living a happy existence, Berry writes:

There were two hard truths that Nick accepted and lived with: life is hard, full of work and pain and fatigue, and at the end of it a man has to go further than he can imagine in any place he knows. And yet among those admitted facts, he was a man rich in pleasures. They were not great pleasures, they cost little or nothing, they were often unexpected, but they surrounded him; they could happen at almost any time, or at odd times, or occasionally. They were pleasures that a man had to pay attention to deeply and intricately, even if he could not have them at all. There was the basic pleasure of eating and drinking and resting, drying after rain, drying after wet, warm again after cold, cool after hot. It was a pleasure to be taken from animals that worked well, as long as you kept in mind the trouble and irritation of using another type. There was joy in the care and well-being of the beautiful animals. It was nice to quit work. There were certain joys in the work itself. It was fun to hunt and go to town, and visit and have company. There was joy in watching and remembering the behavior of things, and talking about it. There was the joy of knowing where the fox lived, planning to drive it, and driving it. And… Nick knew how to use his mind to entertain himself; he remembered and thought and thought and thought. He was a master of what William Carlos Williams called the culture of necessity.

In the evocative sense of Kurt Vonnegut's poem about the secret of happiness and Viktor Frankl's conviction that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the ultimate freedom of man – to choose an attitude in any situation,” Berry adds:

In these times one thinks of it with the same sense of hope that one thinks of the sunrise or the arrival of spring: the image of a man who has worked hard all his life and will struggle to the end, who has no wealth, has little, has no hope of change, who will never “get somewhere” or “become someone,” and is still rich in happiness, happy to use his energy. mind! Isn't this the opposite of the thing that breaks us into pieces? Is there not a great extraordinary power of humanity in this – this humble possibility that all our effort and all our desire is to deny?

Berry takes great care to address the reasonable objection that, given his position as a white man with comfortable possessions, his portrayal of Nick might be misconstrued as romanticized poverty. (Baldwin admitted objections related to comparing the warm-hearted poor of Istanbul with the rich but unsympathetic poor of Switzerland he had met during his relatively fortunate life in Europe.) “I do not feel well,” notes Berry, “the dangers and difficulties in a white man's attempt to write so intimately about the life of a century-old black man.” However, across this vast ocean of time and difference, Berry landed on a shared shore of great wisdom, a bold counterculture:

This much is clear to me: since I can feel such pleasure as I believe Nick felt, I am strong; since I depend on the pleasures that come from my income and possessions, I am weak. I feel more secure in those joys I depend on in the world, as Nick depended more on his, than I depend on the government or the power company or the electronics manufacturers. And I make no concessions to those who think that the poor or anyone else can be improved by responding to that festival of extravagance and ostentation and greed known as our “high standard of living.” As Thoreau knew so well, and earnestly tried to show us, what man needs most is not the knowledge of how to get more, but the knowledge of what he can do without it, and how he can live without it. The fundamental cultural discrimination is not between having and not having, but between having more than what is needed. Wisdom, it seems to me, always rests on the knowledge of small things; it may be thought of as a minor art.

Complete the following passage A Hidden Wound – powerful, tender-hearted, and increasingly necessary – with Baldwin and Mead's view of the time of EF Schumacher's challenging Buddhist economics and Bertrand Russell on the relationship between work, leisure, and social justice, then revisits Berry on how to be a poet and a complete person and his first study of Amandaremer.

Thank you, Courtney