Last week, we learned that Wendell Berry had entered into fellowship with the ‘dead [that] that are alive’.1 I spent the past year reading his work for my master’s dissertation, which explored imagination and sabbath through the lens of his fiction. Though I feel I’m still getting to know the depths of his work, I wish to offer my own tribute as I knew him best: a storyteller. Berry’s fiction has taught me what it means to live with imagination, and to live where I am placed.
Berry describes imagination as a fundamental feature of right living. He writes that, ‘what one actually or provably knows about an actual experience is never complete; it cannot…be made whole’ within the limits of human knowledge.2 Imagination steps in to “‘complete the picture” by transcending’ the horizons of ‘actual memories and provable facts’.3 For Berry, the use of imagination is necessary for seeing ‘the world [as] a work of God, possessed of inherent sanctity’.4 His storytelling is thus grounded in imagination’s role in seeing ‘the meanings, both temporal and eternal, of the condition of things in this world’. 5 By seeing the world with imagination, as Berry himself did, we can come to understand more clearly how the world calls us into life.6
The imaginative life is not fanciful; it is grounded in the life you have, not the one you long for. My favourite of Berry’s protagonists, Hannah Coulter, puts it this way: ‘The chance you have is the life you’ve got.’7 Complaining is understandable, but one cannot ‘wish for another life’ or ‘want to be someone else’.8 Instead, Hannah cites the wisdom of 1 Thessalonians: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.’9 These exhortations situate one within their own being, in its embodied, spiritual, and communal dimensions. This is one of the fundamental failings of one of Berry’s most tragic figures: Troy Chatham. His plight lies in that he was a ‘dreamer’, meaning that ‘he could not imagine himself as he was or where he was[,] and so he dreamed of himself as he never would be.’10 His aim was not to situate himself within the vision passed down by his modest father-in-law Athey, where the land was treated with care and respect. Instead, Troy wished to escape the very things that made his life meaningful: his work, his place, and his community. He sought affection in an affair and took out loans on his farm for the sake of growth and greed. Troy’s overly commercial and commodified perspective alienated his family, who loved him and the land as they were, not as they might be in his dreams. To imagine oneself within the best story—the one that accounts for who and where you are—necessitates turning aside from pastures made green by envy. Hannah puts it well: ‘there is no “better place” than this…it is by this place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.’11
For Berry, community structures two critical dimensions of human flourishing: belonging and embodiment. In his essay, ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community’, he describes contemporary American life as grounded in a reductive vision of freedom, where self-expression and freedom from constraints are its highest goods.12 Communities, growing out of the shared inhabitation of a shared place, invite an alternative perspective: ‘familiarity, mutual respect, mutual affection, and mutual help’ structure life instead of self-sufficiency.13 Imagination makes this kind of communal living possible.
Art, as one of the most concrete expressions of the imagination, has an essentially social function in Berry’s thought. This is not restricted to what is commonly called art, such as writing, painting, music, or drama. For Berry, art is ‘all the ways by which humans make the things they need’.14 This broad and functionalist account of art foregrounds the significance of God’s creative activity and humanity’s initiation to join it: ‘the significance…of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part’.15 The arts, then, don’t simply bring us into transcendent aesthetic experience; they facilitate a way of inhabiting the world at hand. This is why ‘art belongs to the neighborhood’ as a means of communal reflection, direction, and elation.16 Living with imagination, then, is the task of attending to one’s work, place, and community with attention and thankfulness.
More than merely advocating for imagination, Berry puts his own to good use and invites readers to join through his fiction. Berry often takes a singular perspective throughout his works, whether that text is narrated in the first (like Hannah Coulter or Jayber Crow) or third (like Remembering) person. Entrance into his Port William stories is an entrance into the lives of singular people meaningfully present in their time. In this way, readers can see the effects of life’s living on the protagonists. This is the ‘parabolic’ content of Berry’s fiction; rather than taking his fictional writing as a kind of instruction manual, we approach it as a way of seeing the world anew.17 We watch Hannah Coulter’s mourning turn to dancing in the death of her first husband and the birth of her daughter Margaret. Jayber Crow’s shift from selfishness to self-sacrifice in his love for Mattie Chatham is borne out before our eyes. As the restorative effects of forgiveness and reconciliation bring Andy Catlett back to life as he moves from Remembering’s opening nightmare to its concluding vision of beatitude, readers come to reckon with the power of grace. By seeing the world of Port William as a horizon along which to understand our own, we use our imaginations both to recognize that life is beautiful, a golden-threaded tapestry marked by love and gratitude,18 and to ‘practice resurrection’ by living within the generous and attentive vision made possible by the incarnation.19
As Creation sings a lament for one of its dedicated advocates and stewards, I find myself indebted to Wendell Berry. Many people can point to a singular thinker or a set of influences that have come to fundamentally ground or shape their thinking. As many tributes have shown, Berry has had this role for innumerable people. I count myself among them. Spending the past year living within his stories of life’s fullness—its inescapable tragedy and profound grief as much as its inexhaustible richness and ecstatic joy—has been a gift. Though I never got the chance to meet him, it delights me to imagine him bestowing same ‘ancient blessing’ that Hannah grants at the end of Hannah Coulter upon all of us who have received so much from his writing: ‘Good-bye. My Love to you all.’20
Feature image taken by Guy Mendes and used with permission according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Made black and white by the team at Transpositions.
