Wendell Berry: Why He Never Bought a Computer | The Catholic Man Show

Dave turned 40 this week, one day before they hit record, and he wants it understood that he has been looking forward to this. Thirty was a bummer. Forty is different. He expects his forties to be a decade of proficiency instead of a decade of learning how to do everything for the first time: better father, better disciplinarian, better coach, better husband, better at the farm. A decade of potency, he called it, which Adam immediately took in the least charitable direction available and turned into a bit about donating blood and testosterone at the same time. Before that, though, there was a real moment. Adam asked how his spiritual life was and Dave told the truth. He has been in a down recently, the kind where things you have always known to be sinful start to look not that bad, and the only thing that held the line was habit. Intellectual habit, built over years, doing exactly what habit is supposed to do when feeling has gone quiet. Then the piglets. Adam has been building a pig pen since last fall, thinking it through all winter, and Dave finally called to say his sow's litter was ready. Adam ran hot wire that morning, got everything set, and had the sense to put just one pig in first to see what would happen. The pig touched the hot wire, did not get shocked, backed up four steps, ran, and cleared the boards. Twenty seconds. It landed close enough that Adam caught it by a back leg. Welcome to the swine herd community.

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The pour is Pabst Blue Ribbon, which won a blue ribbon at some point a long time ago and has been telling everyone about it ever since. Adam will defend it. Not as a great beer, but as a beer that belongs in the category of things you can hand a man who walks into your house without apologizing. Oklahoma has been over 100 degrees for something like seventy straight days, all of July and all of August, and on a day like that PBR is exactly right.

Then the main topic. Wendell Berry died August 31 at home in Port Royal, Kentucky, at 92. Kentucky farmer, novelist, poet, essayist, five generations on the same ground his family had worked since the early 1800s. He took degrees from the University of Kentucky, went off to the city to be a writer, got everything a young writer is supposed to want, and decided quickly that it was not what he wanted. So he went home. He farmed with horses long after he could afford a tractor. His writing cabin, 16 by 20 feet on stilts over the Kentucky River, had no electric light. He never owned a television or a computer and never sent an email in his life. He answered his mail by hand, including letters from strangers, at length, signing every one "your friend, Wendell Berry."

Dave once told Adam that Berry is his favorite person to read with whom he disagrees, and that line has stuck. Dave is not a pacifist. There are foundational places where he and Berry part ways. But reading Berry sharpened his own thinking precisely because the case on the other side was so well made, so obviously pondered and re-pondered over decades. Not rookie opinions. Not virgin thoughts. Which raises a question worth sitting with: who do you read that you disagree with? Most men cannot answer it, and that is the problem.

Berry's own account of what the land taught him: patience, because the crop keeps its own schedule and will not wait for you. Consequence,