The death of author, poet, ecological activist, and farmer Wendell Berry Aug. 31 has touched students and faculty at Mount St. Joseph University.
The course “The Mad Farmer, Wendell Berry and Common Ground” taught by Elijah Prewill-Davis, Ph.D., was an opportunity to understand the disintegrating culture that American society (and all societies for that matter) was built on. Having taken a class with Prewitt-Davis, whom I appreciated as a professor, I signed up for this class on a whim, but I was entirely unsure of who Wendell Berry was besides as an author. I quickly found out this class was far more exhaustive and in depth than what I was initially anticipating.
My time studying Berry was spent with a small group of my peers. We started the first class loathing the inconvenience of a fully non-digital and entirely analog structure, complaining to one another while we awaited our professor’s arrival.
We started our first class watching videos about this farmer, Wendell Berry, as he spoke about the death of his culture in the modern industrial era—and we shrugged it off. We were a room of students sick and tired of hearing of the outdated ramblings of an old man, and as it was, the only reason we had to even attempt to digest what Berry was saying was Prewitt-Davis’s sheer passion.
Much of the irony of this course was that Berry was a champion of community, real human community. Class in and class out my peers, our professor and I slowly became more acquainted. We practiced philosophical and ideological debates, and what was a long three-hour seminar quickly became something to look forward to.
Wendell Berry encourages us to make the most of the natural world. To place our own limits on ourselves and our practices. He reminds us that yes, we are animals, and animals must alter nature in order to live within it, but he too calls us to never stray too far.
In Berry’s short story “Dismemberment,” Andy Catlett loses his hand to a harvesting machine. Berry describes it as “the price of admission to a rapidly mechanizing world.” While Andy learns to live with the mechanical apparatus where his right hand once was, he finds it can never be a replacement, and only exists effectively when he sees it as a separate tool.
I think the core of Berry’s legacy lies in this story: only through friendship and community is Andy able to overcome the challenges brought to him by the industrial world. It is through community, land, love, and intention that we are capable of overcoming that which robs us of dignity and purpose. In the wake of artificial intelligence, and ever destructive technological innovations, Berry’s memory continues echoing to all who hear the mad farmer in this ever-industrial world.
With winter came the end of the semester. By the time the first snow fell I had realized that I was living in the society Berry had already known us to be in. It all circled back to Berry’s same joke of the mad farmer that Prewitt-Davis had told us that on the very first day of class, “in a society gone insane with industrial greed & insecurity, a man exuberantly sane will appear to be ‘mad’” (Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Poems”).
Berry’s work has inspired me to make changes to my daily life in the name of preserving “the Kingdom of God,” the beautiful and elaborate cycle of life that we all exist within. Whether through thrifting, advocacy, or simply by refusing to participate in the use of ecologically harmful technologies, my peers and I have found a renewed sense of integrity, care, and purpose.