Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities,
sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities earlier this week was
titled: “It All Turns on Affection.”
You can find it here, and while it is long, it is worth the
time it will take to read:
In it he tells stories and offers some explanation for the
times we live in – stories of his family’s land, an explanation of what an
economy really is, and stories of what happens when people, over time,
disconnect their “light within” from their practices, their business, their
learning and their economies. These are
tragic stories, difficult explanations, and they only leave a very thin thread
of hope for humanity. But Berry very
intentionally and very clearly leaves room for hope. And for that I am grateful.
The hope that Wendell Berry offers and imagines comes from
people he calls “stickers.” For Berry,
borrowing from his mentor and teacher Wallace Stegner, stickers are people who
settle in and “love the life they have made and the place they have made it
in.” He paints a picture of his family
over the past several generations, and its relationship with a particular local
landscape and its challenges and beauty.
My sense is that what this “poet, essayist,
novelist, farmer and conservationist” is saying to me in my daily work and life
is that things are connected, and it matters that we learn to love the world
and all that is in it. When we have
forgotten affection, or how to care for the whole, we have brought tragedy and
destruction, violence and poverty on ourselves and our world. I think he is right here. And I think I am to keep working on helping
people figure out how to care – to plant seeds of affection in my own heart and
in the lives of others.
Thanks Wendell Berry and all of my co-laborers in this field
of affection.
Indeed, as Berry concludes, “this has not been inevitable. And we do not have to live as if we are
alone.”
