No Utopia Found in Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? :: What Are People For

No Utopia Found in Wendell plucks What atomic number 18 People For?The preface to Wendell Berrys What Are People For? is in the form of a two-part poem, titled Damage and Healing. By carefully digging by dint of its cryptic obscurities (It is despair that sees the work failing in ones own failure), we find the main message The more diminutive, local, and settled a culture, the healthier it is and the less damage it inflicts upon its people and the land. Berry can be called a utopian but non in the traditional sense. He pines not for the future but for the past. Basing his lifestyle upon his boyhood memories of fifty years ago as well as Americas pioneer days, Berry is confident he has found the answer to the perfect existence. In this case, agree and individual are difficult to separate. What Are People For? is Wendell Berry, so to criticize one is to criticize the other. His book is a compilation of contemplative essays on subjects ranging from literature to technology from the perspective of a Kentucky farmer. Having been in the same profession and location most of his young life, Berry in 1958 (at age twenty-four) accepted a Stanford University Stegner Fellowship. Intrigued, he decided to read Stegners books and take this professors typography seminar. Berry is reverent and testifies that Stegner make full the Jones Room of the Stanford Library with an aura of literary authority. It is here that Berry learns responsible writing. This is writing that contains the values one has proven by living exclusively in one country place and by perfecting ones knowledge of the place so as to bring sustainable benefit to it. Responsible writing actively promotes good agriculture and forestry unlike writing by self-styled smart people in the offices and laboratories of a centralized economy and then sell at the highest possible profit to the supposedly dumb country people. What Berry says about his seminar experience is that it started him on his developme nt toward working at home, and away from his confidence that I was going to follow a literary career that would lead me far from Henry County to teach at a university in a large city. In important ways Berry has some very good ideas. Concerned that radio and television have done too much to homogenize society, he uses Nate Shaw (a pseudonym) to provide an illustration of a man who lived without euphemistic clichs.