Some of you may recognize the allusion to Jayber Crow in the title. Wendell Berry has entered into his rest. I have so many things to say that I fear I won't be able to articulate any of them at all. But I feel the need to mark this occasion. And so perhaps the best thing for me to do is to adopt the form of essay I learned from him, the list, and just begin.

1. I had less personal contact with Mr. Berry than many of my friends in the agrarian and localist movement, but even still I had occasion to note his personal kindness and generosity. When I attended the Front Porch Republic conference in Kentucky in 2019, I took note that Mr. Berry, whose legacy the whole conference honored, sat among the general population of conference-goers and participated like everyone else. During a book-signing / meet-and-greet, he sat not behind a table but in a chair positioned for conversation across from another chair. Each person who wanted to meet him was invited to sit with him and talk a moment.

2. I can say too without betraying any confidences that I know of several instances of his remarkable kindness and generosity to friends of mine. He was a man like any other, and every hero has feet of clay. But I know nothing of him personally that’s not admirable.

3. When I heard of his death, I returned especially to his poetry, because it is there perhaps that we see the man meditating upon his own death. I particularly love a Sabbath poem from 1998, addressed to Tanya: “I know now that in that great distance / on the edge or beyond the edge of this world / I will be growing alight with being. And (listen!) / I will be longing to come back.”

4. Like any writer of controversy, Berry has been much misunderstood. I think perhaps the central misconception about his work, stemming understandably from his radicalism itself, is that he is an “uncompromising” writer. In fact, he is better understood as a thinker always concerned with the painful compromises by which we live our lives. In “The Gift of Good Land,” he stresses: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation.” In one of his best-know “radical” essays, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” he begins with an acknowledgement of his complicity: “I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire.” Or in the essay “The Joy of Sales Resistance,” he penned this rich acknowledgement of human frailty: “Everything, dear reader, is not going to be fine. Because even if we all agreed with all the saints and prophets, all would not be fine. For we would still be mortal, partial, suffering poor creatures, not very intelligent and never the authors of our best hope.” Better perhaps to understand Berry as a compassionate student of human weakness than a raving prophet.

5. Consider also the poem “A Warning to My Readers”: “Do not think me gentle / because I speak in praise of gentleness. . . . / . . ./ That I / may have spoken well at times, is not natural. / A wonder is what it is.”

6. I teach Berry’s work in one class or another most semesters. I have grown accustomed to speaking of him as a living writer. It will be a strange and poignant adjustment for me to speak of him in the past tense.

7. If you haven’t yet explored Berry’s work, let me encourage you to do so. Don’t stop with the best-known pieces, now circulating on social media. Let me commend to you especially Jayber Crow, his best and most representative novel; That Distant Land, a collection of short stories that captures his fictional Port William in its humor and grief; What Are People For?, maybe his best short book of essays from the polemic to the lyrical; his Sabbath poems, collected especially in This Day; and his letters to Gary Snyder, Distant Neighbors, which will give you a look at the man as a friend.

Godspeed, Wendell. Light perpetual shine upon you. I thank God for the work and for the long life, well lived.