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

No Utopia Found in Wendell culls What are community 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 jibe through its cryptic obscurities (It is despair that sees the work failing in mavins own failure), we find the main message The to a greater extent 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 not 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 staring(a) existence. In this case, book 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 techn ology 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 opus seminar. Berry is reverent and testifies that Stegner change the Jones Room of the Stanford Library with an aura of literary authority. It is here that Berry learns amenable writing. This is writing that contains the values one has proven by living solo in one country place and by perfecting ones knowledge of the place so as to bring sustainable advantage to it. Responsible writing actively promotes good agriculture and forestry unlike writing by self-styled smart people in the offices and laboratories of a centralise economy and then sold 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 development towar d working at home, and away from his assumption that I was going to take after 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 goggle box have done too much to homogenize society, he uses Nate Shaw (a pseudonym) to contribute an illustration of a man who lived without euphemistic clichs.