During my recent thought-train ride, I learned that Paul Kingsnorth published a collection of Wendell Berry’s essays in January titled The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (Penguin Books, 2017). Kingsnorth’s introduction and a sample essay can be read here.
Berry’s ten commandments are my essential Wendell Berry:
- Beware the justice of Nature.
- Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
- Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
- In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
- Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
- Put the interest of the community first.
- Love your neighbours – not the neighbours you pick out, but the ones you have.
- Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
- As far as you are able make your life dependent on your local place, neighbourhood, and household – which thrive by care and generosity – and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
- Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.