Why Wendell Berry Didn’t Worry About the Future
· The Atlantic
Wendell Berry was not an easy man to reach. When I wanted to interview him for this magazine in the spring of 2015, his publicist warned me that a press request would take some doing. Berry didn’t have a cellphone. He didn’t use email. He didn’t even have a computer. He wrote most of his drafts by hand during the day, without electric light. And he definitely didn’t make himself available to any old reporter who wanted to talk.
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I knew this already, of course. Berry, who died on Monday at the age of 92, lived a life defined by acts of radical abstention. He said no emphatically and often; principled refusal was a central theme of his writing and the lore that surrounded him.
The publicist spent the better part of a week trying to reach Berry on my behalf. This involved multiple phone calls to his farmhouse, in Henry County, Kentucky, where Berry and his wife, Tanya, had lived since the mid-1960s. Wendell spent most of his time outdoors, the publicist explained, so he often simply wasn’t around to hear the landline ring. After a while, though, she told me that she and Berry had managed to connect, and that he would consider my request. He asked that I write him a letter about the article I had in mind, which I emailed to the publicist so she could print it out and send it to him by post.
[From the February 1991 issue: Out of your car, off your horse]
A few weeks later, I received a voicemail from a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello, Mr. Fassler,” said a voice that was deep and hoarse with age. “This is Wendell Berry.” A giant of Luddism was speaking out of my iPhone. He asked me to call him back.
When we spoke, he told me in a warm, genial way that I was out of luck. “I’m just so covered up with work,” he said, “and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m just busy or because I’m old.” But he’d thought a bit about my letter. I’d asked him to take part in “By Heart,” a series in which authors discussed the passages from literature that had most shaped their writing and outlook. He said that his forthcoming book, Our Only World, contained a section that the magazine might adapt in some way. It hinged on some verses from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, as described in the Gospel of Matthew: “Take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
He asked me to read that section of his book, and to call him back once I had so that we could talk. So I did. And I’ve been thinking about its message ever since.
I was surprised, at first, that Berry felt so drawn to this specific moment from the Bible. Jesus’s instruction to not worry about the future seemed at odds with much of what Berry had written. Many of the social and environmental problems that Berry railed against were really problems of short-term thinking, including the pursuit of quick profit, the extractive poisoning of the land, and the love of cheap thrills over deeper, more hard-won pleasures. “Think not of tomorrow” seemed to better describe the ethos of Berry’s longtime nemeses: coal-industry strip miners, big agribusiness, the global financial system.
It was also an odd choice for someone who seemed so concerned about the excesses of modern life. Berry struck me as someone who absolutely would fixate on the general worsening direction of things. Fretting about the future is a favorite preoccupation of the conscientious. Berry occasionally admitted to his own worried state of mind on the page, including in one of his best-known poems: “When despair for the world grows in me,” he wrote, “I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be.”
Nevertheless, in the part of his book that he asked me to read, he wrote, “Taking thought for the morrow is, fairly predictably, a waste of time.” He insisted that what we call “the future” is a flimsy and insubstantial thing at best—a phantom we obsess over that never really arrives, or never arrives in the way we imagine. “Most of the bad possibilities I have worried about have never happened,” Berry wrote. “By taking thought for the morrow we have invested, and wasted, a lot of effort in preparing for morrows that never came.”
Obsessing about the future, he argued, also has devastating moral consequences. It allows people to avoid engaging with the urgent realities of the present.
I don’t know whether Berry, given his extremely offline lifestyle, ever learned about doomscrolling—the way social media can serve as a collective orgy of dread. But he’s right that, when people become too obsessed with a future that may or may not befall them, they tend to turn their back on the moment they’re in. “The time is coming when it will be too late to save the world. Oh, oh, oh,” he wrote, lampooning the handwringer in so many of us. “If that is the way our minds are afflicted, we and our world are dead already. The present is going by and we are not in it.” As I see it, this was the core purpose of Berry’s work: He dared his readers to live in a way that honors the situation at hand, at this very second.
That mandate suffused everything he wrote about. He exhorted readers to enjoy the food on their plates, to bear witness to the places that surround them, and to revel in shared experience with the people in their orbit. Honoring the present was a joyful thing for Wendell Berry. It was also a form of rewarding but very difficult work. It meant slow, careful deliberation about the things he was willing to let into his life, whether that was a new piece of technology or a request from a journalist.
And it meant searching for ways to disentangle himself, by turns and sometimes painfully, from destructive systems. The moral goal of a human being, he often argued, should be to do less harm right now. When one of his most famous essays, 1987’s “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” resulted in astonished and outraged letters from readers, Berry replied by writing, “I did not say that I proposed to end forthwith all my involvement in harmful technology, for I do not know how to do that. I said merely that I want to limit such involvement, and to a certain extent I do know how to do that.” This response boils down to a simple, radical worldview: We must seek to understand the harms caused by the systems we’re implicated in, then strive to become less reliant on them.
[From the February 1992 issue: A jonquil for Mary Penn]
Berry was no purist. He understood that no 20th- or 21st-century American can live a wholly blameless life. He lamented needing to drive a truck, the unavoidable, occasional use of gas-powered equipment on his farm. He knew that his ancestors had enslaved their fellow human beings and that he, in direct and indirect ways, had benefited from that obscene bondage. “I am owned by the blood of all of them,” he wrote in an early poem, “My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves.” “We cannot be free of each other.”
Moral blamelessness isn’t possible. But Berry’s larger point was that people should strive for something better, here and now. As he put it in Our Only World, with his trademark aphoristic brilliance: “Maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it.” This reframes Jesus’s “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” as a simple, clarifying injunction: Forget the future, and work toward what is good today.
I did speak with Berry a second time. We talked a little while about the Sermon on the Mount, but I didn’t get him to agree to a formal interview. I could tell he wanted to help me, to be a sport. Still, I sensed something else nagging at him: the irresistible presence of the now. He was here, living on this Earth. He had land to tend to, animals to care for, a wife to love, books to write—more than 50 of them, by the end. Maybe someday, in some dimly glimpsed future, he would find some more time to talk with me. But right then, at that moment, there was just too much to do.