The obituary writers are struggling to say who Wendell Berry was, and what we have lost by his death.
One wrote that he was a “voice of nostalgia for an agrarian past”. but he was not a dealer in nostalgia. The past per se did not interest him. It was the future that concerned him.
Others wrote that he was an environmentalist, an activist, a protestor, a prophet. All that is closer.
I think.of him as an artist, and his art was a celebration of creation — which God, having called into being, found to be good. His essentially gentle soul was angered by the exploitation and abuse of the goodness that he saw going on all around him. He spoke out with a passion that some mistook for hatred, but it was only outraged love, rising to the defense of creation. He asked for stability not conquest.
We will honor him best by leading simpler, more respectful lives, in constant awareness and gratitude..
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