The Pond Overfloweth
Carpet chewing, living things, and Wendell Berry's America
A little over a year ago, I toasted Resurrection Sunday with two dead Englishmen: Roman Catholic G.K. Chesterton and non-believer George Orwell. If you weren’t with me then, or if you caught that rambling ditty and wouldn’t mind reading it again, you can find it here.
This year, Easter came and went.
In its vibrant, soul-rousing wake, I found myself thumbing through the archives… and re-reading what I published a year ago. After shrugging off the dreadful, tingling feeling of reading old writing (it’s kind of like lifting up the flat, heavy object and making sure that the spider I squished is really dead…) what I found turned out to be edifying.
Though oddly paired—while Chesterton’s ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’ inspired, and even shares a fictionalized time and place with Orwell’s ‘1984’ the two thinkers stand worlds apart—I found them nudging each other to a kind of imagination-based apologetic: both for the tragedy of sin and death, and the broad Christian hope that lights up everything like an approaching comet.
What can I say? At least in my Americanized, Protestant Christian, light-to-non denominational and stubbornly non-woke mind, the pairing made sense.
This time around, it still does.
So once again, and in a prelude to D.T. Adams’ fine sampler of Wendell Berry’s ‘Unsettling of America’ I’ll quote two of my betters—one of them known for slapping materialism around in a kind of celebratory taunt.
If it’s not word for word, at least it’s hope for hope.
The Living Do It Again
If a thing repeats itself, again and again ad infinitum, chances are it’s alive. Not dead and lifeless. That something goes on repeating itself is a great miracle, and not as normal or rule-following as the men in lab coats would have us believe. Rather, living repetition is all ebullience, a kind of childish energy that even, (not yet middle-aged but writing as if I am) makes us nap-lovers jealous.
The paradigm flip is all Chesterton:
“A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into a bus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness.
They very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death.
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning but the variation is due not to my activity, but my inaction…now it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.”1
Good so far?
It gets even better.
“The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they especially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”2
I write this with a bird’s eye view of my crawling, nine-month old son—the one who loves going to a spot between the kitchen and the living room to chew up the edge of the carpet.
That’s to say, (and if you have kids, or nieces, or nephews, you know the score), I’ll never see Chesterton’s example the same way again.
Though he’s talking about the lively work of William Shakespeare, not materialistic assumptions and their bankrupt understanding of the cosmos, George Orwell complements the tune.
“Indeed, Tolstoy’s whole theory shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere ant-like rushings to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting… his reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. ‘Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?’
In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost.”3
But where Orwell, as far as we know, leaves it there, Chesterton soars.
Here, and like his own idea of the heavenly chariot of the Christian church ‘thundering through the ages, reeling but erect,’ the nearly three hundred pound apologist streaks through the skies like a fighter jet.
“It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening. “Do it again” to the moon. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but he has never got tired of making them.”
It may very well be—and that possibility casts yet another glow on Easter, theism, and the Christian faith in the resurrection of the body.
The extended metaphor, not to mention the whole line of thinking, is of course fanciful. It’s a plain, Chestertonian rebuttal, plenty whimsical but dead serious in asking ‘what if.’
If there’s no meaning to living things, and if a living thing repeats itself without variation in a kind of lifeless autopilot, then that shrieking, squealing thing that’s repeatedly crawling over to the same spot of carpet isn’t what I think it is. If that’s the case, then broadly speaking, my son’s just an organic matter wind-up toy. His relentless assault on the same patch of carpet is automatic programming: just chemicals and organic matter interacting in a way that they never, ever do, or have outside of this planet.
That is, dead and lifeless. No soul growing into a certain shape of heart and mind for an eternal existence.
Chesterton, like Easter, like Christianity, leaves this dead, meaningless, endlessly repeating universe telos in shreds. (Sartre and Camus, oddly enough, realized that a meaningless existence conveniently fills up with our own personal-individual meaning… hence its popularity.) Unlike atheism-naturalism-materialism, which boasts of free thinking and unbridled imagination but can’t answer any kind of why, Chesterton pins a corner.
Living creatures thrumming with activity suggest meaning, liveliness, and even personality. All to a clearly revealed end.
God’s Dirt
There’s an old creation joke.
In the future, scientists finally learn how to make their own human beings. Ready, as it were, to challenge God to a creature-making duel, they head over to the big guy.
God accepts.
But when the scientists gather around a clump of matter with their gizmos ready, God folds his arms.
“Why don’t you get your own dirt?”
On Resurrection Sunday, some two thousand years ago, something strange and wonderful happened. Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox—Christians celebrate because literally everything, everything personal, everything material and supernatural, everything in the not-so-distant future, hinges on that day, when hopes, prophecies and the daunting question why were all fulfilled.
The author of Ecclesiastes wrote that there’s nothing new under the sun. On accident, and even if King Solomon (allegedly) had no particular flair for steampunk, we might call this author the first dystopian. Or the first materialist. Though vibrant and alive, a world with nothing new strikes us a world doomed to drift and die—as was the case—not one meant to repeat itself with grander and greater leaps of energy.
All this is to say that, like the dirt, God owns variation too. Patterns, breaking them, breaking the compromised, life-rushing, regenerating while dying pattern of everything around us with a more powerful rush of life? Apparently.
To Ecclesiastes and to all the skeptics, Chesterton would tell us that one new thing happened—a someone we all know. A person in recorded history who titled all history on its side. One man riven by death before he broke every pattern with an even grander one, Phoenix from the ashes not even coming close. One man smarter, more knowing, and yet younger than we who have sinned and grown old (Chesterton again). One heir and authority with the same childlike ebullience that tells every sunrise, every crashing wave, every budding poppy of a West Coast super bloom ‘do it again.’
My this Easter find you, like me, like my son and my carpet, resuscitated.
By His grace and to His glory and pleasure, we’ll do it again.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
-Hamlet, Act One, Scene Five
“Life,” Theodore Dalrymple writes, “is increasingly urban.”
But where the traveling, danger-courting Dalrymple is more resigned to urban living, author Wendell Berry (in something of the vein of Victor Davis Hansen) prods us with questions from America’s small-town past.
Read on for D.T. Adams on Berry’s ‘The Unsettling of America.’
Wendell Berry and The Unsettling of America
by D.T. Adams
What happens when a society moves, en masse, from farms and small communities to big cities? When industrial factories and the office take work away from the home and family? What happens when the home becomes a place of mere recreation instead of productivity?
This is an experiment the West, and increasingly, countries around the world have been running for the last hundred years or so.
Perhaps one of the most prominent recent figures daring to ask how the mad hum of factory and cubicle is working out for us, author-poet-activist Wendell Berry gives us reason to pause. A modest Kentucky farmer who graduated from the University of Kentucky, Berry’s essays, poetry, and fiction have now influenced multiple generations of men and women born into the Industrial Age. His essays, in particular, struck a chord with me as I read them this past winter.
The fact that I was visiting family in the pastoral setting of East Tennessee, among the rolling foothills of the Appalachians colored the reading, and no doubt accentuated the impact. Again, like Victor Davis Hanson, Berry writes from the perspective of a farmer who has seen the effects of industrial farming on his community first hand. His writing, and research, touches on farming communities around the U.S.
One of the ways Berry makes his mark as a writer is by threading agricultural research, literary symbolism, and the social effects of industrialization into a single narrative. To that end, ‘Unsettling America’ pulls back the curtain on modern American life to reveal the inner workings of our infrastructure, social and industrial; specifically, the American household and the industrial food system.
Berry’s concern is that, in treating land and animals as machines instead of creatures, we begin to treat people as machines, too. In the Book of Genesis, Adam, made from the dirt, was to tend and keep the garden growing up from that same dirt of which he was made. By reducing farmland and animals to mere machines that produce X product, Berry argues that we begin to insist on higher production per hour without regard for the health of the land or animal. We can’t do this, he adds, without beginning to treat people the same way—as machines from which a product is to be extracted.
Insightful but provocative, Berry’s writing on America’s transformation tends to split readers. Of course, we’ve all experienced the benefits of industrialization. Remembering pre-industrial trials like subsistence farming, the dust bowl, or even childbirth and infant mortality rates (and to marvel at how high they were), should invoke gratitude and astonishment—and no doubt a clear preference for not living in the pre-industrial age.
Still, questions remain, and Berry dares to ask them.
Have the benefits of the Industrial Revolution outweighed the consequences?
‘Unsettling America’ is (pardon the pun) some excellent food for thought.
What do you think?
If you have any thoughts on Wendell Berry’s writing, or about his thoughts on how farming, industrialization, and technology have changed the country, don’t be shy.
Hop in the pond and leave a comment.
Coming Up
Noah Elkins and C.M. Miller roll up their poetry sleeves.
In a final nod to Resurrection Sunday, the poet of this month will be scholar, MP, and Anglican Pastor George Herbert: a gem to Christian readers and all who love smart, devotion-thrumming stanzas.
Until then, thanks for reading.
He is Risen Indeed.
Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton. Pages 55 - 56.
Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton. Pages 55 - 56.
From the essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool’ https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf
On the note of 'Unsettling America' one of my readers was chatting with me about the Qatsi film trilogy. The first movie 'Koyaanisqatsi' came out in the early eighties. No dialogue, no subtitles: just time-lapse and slow motion footage of urban and natural landscapes. The angle is showing the chaotic relationship between humans, nature, and technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi
Has anyone seen that movie or one of the two sequels?
I recognized the sequel 'Powaqqatsi' from footage used by a fan of British indie band Alt-J in a music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3fTw_D3l10