University Place

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Alison Jones Chaim

I'm the director of the Wisconsin Book Festival, and this is really amazing. ( applause ) Welcome to our first event in Overture Hall. And a humongous amount of thanks straight off the bat to the Overture Center for the Arts for having us. We just love being your houseguests every year. And this is so special, it's just amazing. On behalf of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, I would like to welcome you to this afternoon's keynote event. We wouldn't be here without many generous sponsors. So I'd like to thank a moment to thank them. This evening's very special event was made possible by partnership with the Aldo Leopold Foundation. ( applause ) Other generous contributors include our presenting sponsors, who include the American Girl Fund for Children, Isthmus, without whom we wouldn't have known where to go, the Overture Center for the Arts who I already mentioned, IMS - ( phone vibrates ) Ooh, that's what happens when your phone's on vibrate on the podium. ( laughter ) Sorry. I thought it was all taken care of. IMS, who power our website, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There are dozens of other organizations and hundreds of individuals who contribute their time and funds. If you would like to join them by making a contribution to the Wisconsin Book Festival, we do have donation envelopes available in the main lobby. This year, you may already, if you've attended any Book Festival events, have been given little orange raffle ticket entry cards, and that's our way of saying thank you to all of you, although it'll only be some of you. Because the winners of the raffle will get signed books by some of our esteemed authors, including Mr. Berry. We'll be announcing those winners by email and on our website tomorrow, so there's not a drawing today, no one has to be present. If you didn't yet enter, we'd love to have an orange ticket entry from you, and you can also find those on the tables out front. We have Rainbow Bookstore. ( applause ) Hooray for Rainbow. ( applause ) Selling books outside, some of you probably picked them up. After the event, Mr. Berry will be signing books, so please make sure that you support the booksellers by picking one up and get something to keep forever and ever and to give to your children. Without the booksellers there would be no book festival, so we really appreciate your ability to support them. A couple of other thank-yous from me personally to my esteemed colleagues at the Wisconsin Humanities Council. I couldn't do any of this without all of you, I really appreciate everyone going above and beyond every single year. ( applause ) To our volunteer coordinator, Cynthia Schuster, who coordinated all of the wonderful volunteers, who are next on the list to be thanked, thank you, volunteers, you are the face and the glue of the Wisconsin Book Festival. Without you, it wouldn't happen. Let's give them a round of applause. ( applause ) And now, I am very happy to present, from the Aldo Leopold Foundation, Buddy Huffaker, and from the Wisconsin Humanities Council, Dena Wortzel. ( applause ) >>

Dena Wortzel

Thank you all, and needless to say, we really wouldn't be here without Alison, so thank you, Alison. ( applause ) Well, welcome, thank you all so much for being here this afternoon, this is such a special event. In fact, this is an event that I've imagined for the last eight years since we had the first Wisconsin Book Festival. Though my love of Wendell Berry's work goes back much farther, back to when I was a city girl who fell in love with a horse and a man and a farm. But Mr. Berry's work spoke to me then, back when I was a city girl, as it speaks to me now, and as I'm sure it has spoken to all of you who've come here from near and far to be with him today. I'm so grateful to our friends from the Aldo Leopold Foundation, on whose behalf Mr. Berry has come to Wisconsin. When the Wisconsin Humanities Council made a commitment several years ago to help folks here in Wisconsin think more deeply about the relationship between our communities and the land upon which we depend, we knew that Aldo Leopold would be one of our touchstones. As the Humanities Council carries forward the initiative that we're calling "Wisconsin: Making it Home," we're helping Wisconsin citizens be newly inspired by our legacy as a home to Leopold and to Muir and to other visionaries of the land. We're trying to stir up conversation with people across the state, involving people like urban farmer Will Allen, who was here in Madison with us recently. ( applause ) Yeah, we love Will. And people like author and conservationist Curt Meine who's going to be here, and you'll hear from him in a moment introducing Mr. Berry. And of course, most notably, involving our special guest here this afternoon. Every time has its poets and its moral guides whose words turn the world around for us and draw us close to the heart of something that perhaps we'd only previously glimpsed. Wendell Berry is such a writer and a thinker, and so to introduce him to you, I'm going to turn this over to my friend and our colleague Buddy Huffaker. >>

Buddy Huffaker

Hi, I'm Buddy Huffaker, executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and on behalf of everybody at the foundation, I want to just say how pleased and proud we are to be once again part of the book festival, so thank you Dena, Alison, and all of you at the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Well, wow, what a welcome for Wendell. Deservedly so. ( applause ) I also want to take a moment to welcome Tanya Berry, his wife, who so graciously joined him, and is seated... ( applause ) Who is seated with the matriarch of the Leopold community, Nina Leopold Bradley. ( applause ) Wendell, I told you that this was going to be a warm crowd here, see? I also want to extend thanks to everybody who is a member and supporter of the Wisconsin Humanities Council and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. It is not an overstatement to say that we would not exist without your generous support. And it is your generosity that makes programs like this possible. So we thank you. For those of you who are not at this point a part of our community, we invite you and encourage you to formally become part of that community, there will be opportunities for you out in the lobby, and it really is important as we come together and build this collective network of people that share the values that bring us all here together today. My last little piece of business is to introduce the individual who's going to introduce Mr. Berry. You guys know how all this goes, so we appreciate your patience. But we have in our midst the special privilege of having Dr. Curt Meine work in our community and advance these very same kind of concepts about the relationship between people and land. And many of you probably know Curt personally, if you don't, you probably know him as one of the biographers of Aldo Leopold, as the author of "Correction Lines," perhaps as a community organizer and activist in Sauk City, working to ensure the future of the Badger Army Ammunitions Plant. He's a director for the Center for Humans and Nature, one of our other great partners, and kind of philosophical think tank and community action organization with offices in New York, Chicago, South Carolina, and I'm also pleased to announce, outposts in Salina, Kansas and Baraboo, Wisconsin. Some of you can probably connect the constellation there. Curt is also a senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. I've had the privilege to work with him over the last 13 years, to advance the vision and values of Aldo Leopold. Most currently we are working on the first high-quality documentary about Leopold's life, titled "Green Fire," which will feature Leopold's life and legacy, and we hope to bring that to you next year in 2010, so keep your eyes and ears open. Without further ado, Curt and our program for this afternoon. ( applause ) >>

Curt Meine

Thank you, Buddy, and thank you to all my colleagues and to the book festival for what is for me a very special opportunity and honor. I have to do one bit of housekeeping, you all got those little cards, I think, when you came in? That's to write any questions down that you might have for our guest tonight. As at the end of the presentation, those cards will be collected if you do have a question, and my good colleagues will sort through for the very best of them to make sure it's a good question. We're doing this in order to hopefully make it more efficient so there's more time and more opportunity to take advantage of Wendell Berry's being with us. So think on those questions as we're going forward and after the presentation, they'll be collected by volunteers, okay? Thank you. So. Although our guest tonight and I have only met a handful of times over the years, I've grown up as I know many of you have, with tonight's speaker. Starting 30 some years ago when I, as an undergraduate, I think, began to first read and appreciate Wendell Berry. And for me he has been like a family elder who you don't see that often, but you do grow up with. He has always been there as a part of an extended clan that I have felt a continual kinship with, that I have identified with, that I've defended, that I've, in my own way, tried to contribute to. At some times I've rebelled against, and sometimes I've walked away from it. But I've always come home again. And when I've come home to the clan, there has always been Wendell Berry. This morning I had another opportunity to introduce Wendell and I said, "There's Wendell." And I left it at that, and truly that is enough introduction. I will say just a bit more this evening. Wendell and I have had a little correspondence in the last month, I've asked him to assist me in a project I'm working with, and I asked him if he would be willing to contribute an introduction. He did write me back and he said in his letter, "Since I'm trying to swear off introductions, we may have to call it something like an 'appreciation.'" So I am not going to introduce Wendell Berry, I'm going to appreciate him a little bit. And everyone here tonight, I know, would have your own expression of appreciation or else you would not be here. Here are a few of mine. As an organism, alive on the earth, I appreciate Wendell Berry's willingness and ability to think, write, speak, and live as a fellow organism, alert to the things and relationships that we need to keep well this earth. As an organism that has been known to occasionally eat, I appreciate Wendell Berry's career-long commitment to the health of our soils, our bodies, our landscapes, our body politic, our economies, our culture, our language, our communities, and to understand that there's ties that bind them all together. As a writer I appreciate Wendell Berry's breadth, his craftsmanship, his commitment personal and literary to place. I appreciate the example he's provided of a writer not constricted by that commitment but liberated by it. I appreciate that he has spoken for and from rural places, albeit with his eyes wide open to the changing realities of rural life. As a reader, I appreciate his clarity and again, his craftsmanship. I appreciate that even when I find myself disagreeing with Wendell, that's not that often, but occasionally I'll read something and have to question it, I do so in a way that sharpens and clarifies my own thoughts. I appreciate in that way the respect that Wendell Berry gives his readers. I appreciate a couple specifics that I'm going to take advantage of this moment to mention. I appreciate his book "The Hidden Wound," not one that many of even his own fans have read, perhaps. It was an early, unique, remarkable statement in exploration at the intersection of history, race, identity, land, work, literature, and justice. It's a remarkable book, I just got a chance backstage to thank him for writing that one. And I appreciate on a little smaller scale this line from "Manifesto: The Mad Farmers' Liberation Front." I appreciate this line. "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts." ( laughter and applause ) As a conservationist, I appreciate the immeasurable contributions Wendell Berry has made to our efforts, our collective efforts, to create a more just, sustainable community. I appreciate his notion that we have to solve for pattern, from an essay of Wendell Berry's. His understanding that to solve any of the multiple crises that are now converging and synergistically creating the perfect storm, that we have to go forward in ways that we find solutions that aren't just piecemeal. That the solutions we are striving for have to solve many problems simultaneously and not create new ones as we do so. Finally, as a fellow citizen, I appreciate Wendell Berry's courage. That is the theme on the poster of the book festival. Wendell Berry's willingness to be an independent voice, I appreciate his acuity, his consciousness, his conscience. Especially in these last eight years. I think I've kept this book, "Citizenship Papers," by my bedside for the last five years since it was published. Most of all I appreciate his and Tanya's willingness to take a few days away from Kentucky to come to Wisconsin. I appreciate what it is to be away from a farm in October. It's not easy. This, as I understand it, is Wendell's first full visit to Madison. And I know he's been to Wisconsin before, but this is the first opportunity really we've had to welcome him on a nice, clear, brisk October Sunday. So please join me in welcoming to Madison, to Wisconsin, and to the Wisconsin Book Festival, Wendell Berry. ( applause ) >>

Wendell Berry

Well, Curt, thank you. The embarrassment of such an introduction is that I would like to praise your for it, but I dare not say that I agree with you. ( laughter ) In fact, your admission that you sometimes disagree with me is probably the most important thing you said, because a writer's freedom depends on somebody being there to disagree with him. The older I get the less I want the last word. And I think it's a great, healthy, invigorating feeling that you're going to say what you have to say the best you can, but everybody's not going to agree. That's a relief. And I must say, I appreciate this audience, you people in Wisconsin are going to send me home badly spoiled. Sometimes I can't even get the dog to listen to me at home. ( laughter ) By happy coincidence, your theme is "Making it Home," and a number of years ago I wrote a short story called "Making it Home," so I didn't have to think too long about what I would do when I got here. This is a story set in 1945, a year that's, since 1945, never been very far from my mind. Even when I was young and didn't understand as much as I needed to about it. I just read a book by the historian John Lukacs called "1945." He called it the "year zero." The year of great geographical and political changes, changes of political and geographical configuration. And he's good on the subject. For me, 1945 has been a kind of fulcrum year. It's the year of the end of World War II, of course. But it's also the year when we became free to turn our great technical power that we had generated in order to win the war upon our own landscapes. To apply that terrible doctrine of maximum force relentlessly applied to problems like crop insects, and weeds, with, as you know, dire consequences. "Making it Home." ( reading ) He had crossed the wide ocean and many a river. Now not another river lay between him and home, but only a few creeks that he knew by name. Arthur Roundberry had come a long way, trusting somebody else to know where he was. And now he knew where he was himself. The great river, still raised somewhat from the flood of that spring, and flowing swiftly, lay off across the fields to his left. To his right and farther away were the wooded slopes of the Kentucky side of the valley, that's the Ohio Valley. And over it all, from the tops of the hills on one side to the tops of the hills on the other, stretched the gray sky. He was walking along the paved road that followed the river upstream to the county seat of Hargrave. On the higher ground to the right of the road stood fine brick farmhouses that had been built 100 and more years ago, from the earnings of the rich bottomland fields that lay around them. There had been a time when those houses had seemed as permanent to him as the land they stood on, but where he had been, they had the answer to such houses. We wouldn't let one of them stand long in our way, he thought. Art Roundberry walked like the first man to discover upright posture, as if having been a creature no taller than a sheep or a pig, he had suddenly risen to the height of six feet and looked around. He walked, too, like a man who had been taught to march and he wore a uniform. But whatever was military in his walk was an overlay, like the uniform, for he had been a man long before he had been a soldier, and farmer long before he had been a man. An observer might have sensed in his walk and in the way he carried himself a reconciliation to the forms and distances of the land, such as comes only to those who have, from childhood, been accustomed to the land's work. The noises of the town were a long way behind him. It was too early for the evening chores and the farmsteads that he passed were quiet. Birds sang. From time to time he heard a farmer call out to his team. Once he had heard a tractor off somewhere in the fields and once a towboat out on the river, but those sounds had faded away. No car had passed him, though he walked a paved road. There was no sound near him but the sound of his own footsteps falling steadily on the pavement. Once it had seemed to him that he walked only on the place where he was, but now having gone and returned from so far, he knew that he was walking on the whole, round world. He felt the great empty distance that the world was turning in, far from the sun and the moon and the stars. Here, he thought, is where we do what we are going to do. The only chance we got. And if somebody was to be looking down from up there, it would all look a lot littler to him than it does to us. He was talking carefully to himself in his thoughts, forming the words more deliberately than if he were saying them aloud, because he did not want to count his steps. He had a long way still to go and he did not want to know how many steps it was going to take, nor did he want to hear in his head the counted cadence of marching. I ain't marching, he thought. I am going somewheres. I am going up the river towards Hargrave, and this side of Hargrave before the bridge at Elville, I will turn up the Kentucky River and go ten miles and turn up Sandripple below Port William, and I will be at home. He carried a duffel bag that contained his overcoat, a change of clothes, and a shaving kit. From time to time he shifted the bag from one shoulder to the other. I reckon I am done marching, have marched my last step, and now I am walking. There is nobody in front of me, and nobody behind. I have come here without a "by your leave" to anybody. Them that have known where I was or was supposed to, for three years, don't know where I am now. Nobody that I know knows where I am now. He came from killing. He had felt the ground shaken by men and what they did. Where he was coming from, they thought about killing day after day and feared it and did it. And out of the unending, unrelenting great noise and tumult of the killing, went little deaths that belonged to people one by one. Some had feared it and had died. Some had died without fearing it, lacking the time. They had fallen around him until he was amazed that he stood. Men who, in a little while, had become his buddies, most of them younger than he, just boys. The fighting had been like work, only a lot of people got killed and a lot of things got destroyed. It was not work that made much of anything. You and your people intended to go your way if you could. And you wanted to stop the other people from going their way, if you could. And whatever interfered, you destroyed. You had a thing on your mind that you wanted, or wanted to get to. And anything at all that stood in your way, you had the right to destroy. If what was in the way were women and little children, you would not even know it, and it was all the same. When your power is in a big gun, you don't have any small intentions. Whatever you want to hit, you want to make dust out of it. Farm buildings, houses, whole towns. Things that people had made well and cared for a long time, you made nothing of. We blew them apart and scattered the pieces so they couldn't be put together again. And people too. We blew them apart and scattered the pieces. He had seen tatters of human flesh hanging in the limbs of trees, along with pieces of machines. He had seen bodies without heads, arms and legs without bodies, strewn around indifferently as chips. He had seen the bodies of men hanging upside down from a tank turret, lifeless as dolls. Once when they were firing their gun, the man beside him, Eckstrom, began to dance, and Art thought, this ain't no time to be dancing. But old Eckstrom was dancing because he was shot in the head, was killed, his body trying on its own to keep standing. And others had gone down, near enough to Art almost that he could have touched them as they fell. Jones, Bitmer, Hirsch, Walters, Corelli. He had seen attackers coming home, climbing over the bodies of those who had fallen ahead of them. A man who in one moment had been a helper, a friend, in the next was only a low mound of something in the way, and you stepped over him or stepped on him and came ahead. Once while they were manning their gun and under fire themselves, old Eckstrom got mad, and he said, "I wish I had those sons of bitches lined up to where I could shoot every damn one of 'em." And Art said, "Them fellers over there are doing about the same work we are, it appears like to me." There were nights when the sky and all the earth appeared to be on fire, and yet the ground was covered with snow and it was cold. At Christmas he was among those trapped at Bastogne. He had expected to die, but he was spared as before, though the ground shook and the town burned under a sky bright as day. They held their own when others fighting on the outside broke through. We was mighty glad to see that day when it come, he thought. That was a good day. The fighting went on, the great tearing apart, people and everything else were torn into pieces. Everything was only pieces put together that were ready to fly apart, and nothing was whole. You got to where you could not look at a man without knowing how little it would take to kill him, for a man was nothing but just a little morsel of soft flesh and brittle bone inside of some clothes. And you could not look at a house or a schoolhouse or a church without knowing how, rightly hit, it would just shake down into a pile of stones and ashes. There was nothing you could look at that was whole, man or beast or house or tree, that had the right to stay whole very long. There was nothing above the ground that was whole but you had the measure of it and could separate its pieces and bring it down. You moved always in a landscape of death, wreckage, cinders, and snow. And then having escaped so far, he was sitting by his gun one afternoon, eating a piece of chocolate, and talking to an old red-headed, freckle-faced boy named McBride, and a shell hit right where they were. McBride just disappeared, and a fragment came to Art as if it were his own, and had known him from the beginning of the world, and had burrowed into him. From a man in the light on the outside of the world, he was transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a man in the dark on the inside of himself, in pain. And he thought that he was dead. How long he was in that darkness he did not know. When he came out of it he was in a place that was white and clean, the hospital. And he was in a long room with many beds. There was sunlight coming in the window. A nurse who came by seemed glad to see him. "Well, hello, bright eyes," she said. He said, "Why, howdy." She said, "I think the war is over for you, soldier." "Yes, ma'am," he said, "I reckon it is." She patted his shoulder. "You almost got away from us, you know it?" And he said, "Yes, ma'am, I expect I did." The uniform he wore as he walked along the road between Jefferson and Hargrave was now too big for him. His shirt collar was loose on his neck in spite of the neatly tied tie. And under his tightened belt, the waistband of his pants gathered in pleats. He stayed in hospitals while his life grew back around the wound, as a lightning-struck tree will sometimes heal over the scar. Until finally they gave him his papers and let him go. And now though he walked strongly enough along the road, he was still newborn from his death, and inside himself he was tender and a little afraid. The bus had brought him as far as the town of Jefferson on the north side of the river, letting him out in the middle of the afternoon in front of the hotel that served also as a bus station. From there he could have taken another bus to Hargrave, had he been willing to wait until the next morning. But now that he was in familiar country, he did not have it in him to wait. He had known many a man who would have waited, but he was old for a soldier. Though he was coming from as far as progress had reached, he belonged to an older time. It did not occur to him, any more than it would've occurred to his grandfather, to wait upon a machine for something he could furnish for himself. And so he thanked the kind lady at the hotel desk, shouldered his bag, and set out for home on foot. The muddy Ohio flowed beneath the bridge, and a flock of pigeons wheeled out and back between the bridge and the water, causing him to sway as he walked, so that to steady himself he had to look at the hills that rose over the rooftops beyond the bridge. He went down the long southward arc of the bridge, and for a little while, he was among houses again. And then he was outside the town, walking past farmsteads and fields, in unobstructed day. The sky was overcast, but the clouds were high. It ought to clear off before morning, he thought. Maybe it'll be one of them fine spring days, maybe it'll do to work, for I have got to get started. They would already have begun plowing, he thought, his father and his brother Mart. Though they had begun the year without him, they would be expecting him. He could hear his father's voice saying, "Any day now, any day." But he was between lives. The war had been a life, such as it was, and now he was out of it. The other life, the one he had once had and would have again, was still ahead of him. He was not in it yet. He was only free. He had not been out in the country or alone in a long time. Now that he had the open countryside around him again, and was alone, he felt the expectations of other people fall away from him like a shed skin, and he came into himself. I am not under anybody's orders, he thought. What I expect myself to do, I will do it. The government don't owe me, and I don't owe it, except when I have something again that it wants, then I reckon I will owe it. It pleased him to think that the government owed him nothing, that he needed nothing from it, and he was on his own. But the government seemed to think that it owed him praise. It wanted to speak of what he and the others had done as heroic and glorious. Now that the war was coming to an end, the government wanted to speak of their glorious victories. The government was made up of people who thought about fighting, not those who did it. The men sitting behind desks, they spent other men to buy ground, and then they ruined the ground they had, and more men to get the ground beyond. If they were on the right side, they did it the same as them that were on the wrong side. They talk about victory as if they know all them dead boys was glad to die. The dead boys ain't never been asked how glad they was. If they had it to do again, might be they wouldn't do it. Or might be they would, but they ain't been asked. Under the clouds, the country all around was quiet except for birds singing in the trees, wherever there were trees. And now and then a human voice calling out to a team. He was glad to be alive. He had been glad to be alive all the time he had been alive. When he was hit and thought he was dead, it had come to him how good it was to be alive, even under the shelling, even when it was at its worst. And now he had lived through it all and was coming home. He was now a man who had seen far places and strange things, and he remembered them all. He had seen Kansas and Louisiana, and Arizona. He had seen the ocean. He had seen the little farms and country towns of France and Belgium and Luxembourg, pretty, before they were ruined. For one night, he was in Paris. That Paris, now, we was there one day and one night. There was wine everywheres and these friendly girls who said "Kees me." And I don't know what happened after about ten o'clock. I come to the next morning in this hotel room, sick and broke, with lipstick from one end to the other. I reckon I must've had a right good time. At first, before he was all the way in it, there was something he liked about the war. A reduction that in a way was pleasing. From a man used to doing and thinking for himself, he became a man who did what he was told. That laying around half a day waiting for somebody else to think, that was something I had to learn. It was fairly restful. Even basic training tired him less than what he would ordinarily have done at that time of year. He gained weight. And from a man with a farm and crops and stock to worry about, he became a man who worried only about himself, and the little bunch of stuff he needed to sleep, dress, eat, and fight. He furnished only himself. The army furnished what little else it took to make the difference between a man and a beast. More than anything else, he liked his mess kit. It was all the dishes a man really needed, and when you weren't cooking or eating with it, you could keep things in it, a little extra tobacco, maybe. When I get to Elville, he thought, I won't be but mighty little short of halfway. I know the miles and how they lay out, end to end. It had been evening for a while now. On the farmsteads that he passed, people were busy with the chores. He could hear people calling their stock, dogs barking, children shouting and laughing. On one farm that he passed, a woman, a dog, and a small boy were bringing in the cows. In the driveway of the barn he could see a man un-harnessing a team of mules. It was as familiar to him as his own breath, and because he was outside it still, he yearned toward it, as a ghost might. As he passed by, the woman, perhaps because he was a soldier, raised her hand to him, and he raised his own in return. After a while he could see ahead of him the houses and trees of Elville, and over the trees the superstructure of the bridge, arching into Hargrave. All during his walk so far, he had been offering himself the possibility that he would walk on home before he would sleep. But now that he had come nearly halfway, and Elville was in sight, he knew he would not go farther that day. He was tired. And with his tiredness had come a sort of melancholy, and a sort of aimlessness, as if, all his ties cut, he might go right on past his home river and on and on, anywhere at all in the world. The little cluster of buildings ahead of him now seemed only accidentally there, and he himself there, only accidentally. He had arrived, as he had arrived again and again during the healing of his wound, at the apprehension of a pure emptiness, as if at the center of an explosion, as if, without changing at all, he and the town ahead of him, and all the long way behind him, had been taken up into a dream in which every creature and everything sat, like that boy McBride, in the dead center of the possibility of its disappearance. In the little town, a lane turned off the highway and went out beyond the houses and across the river bottom, for perhaps a quarter of a mile, to a barn. And beyond the barn to a small weather boarded church. It was suppertime then. The road and the dooryards were deserted. Art entered the lane and went back past the gardens and the clutter of outbuildings that lay behind the houses. At the barn there was a cistern with a chain pump. He sat down his bag and pumped and drank from his cupped left hand, held under the spout. Looks like I ought to be hungry, he thought, but I ain't. He was not hungry. And there was no longer anything much that he wanted to think. He was tired. He told himself to lift the bag again and put it on his shoulder. He told his feet to walk, and they carried him on to the church. The door was unlocked. He went in. He shut the door behind him, not allowing the latch to click. The quiet inside the church was palpable. He came into it, as into a different element, neither air nor water. He crossed the tiny vestibule where a bell rope dangled from a worn hole in the ceiling, went through another door that stood open, and sat down on the first bench to his left, leaving his duffel bag in the aisle, propped against the end of a bench. He let himself become still. I will eat a little, he thought, 'gainst I get hungry in the night. After a while he took a bar of candy from the bag and slowly ate it. The church windows were glazed with an amber colored glass that you could not see through. And though it was still light outdoors, in the church it was dusk. When he finished the candy, he folded the wrapper soundlessly and put it in his pocket. Taking his overcoat from the bag to use as a blanket, he lay down on the bench. Many thoughts fled by him, none stopping, and then he slept. He woke several times in the night, listening, and hearing no threat out in the darkness anywhere, slept again. The last time he woke, roosters were crowing and he sat up. He sat still a while in the dark, allowing the waking quiet of the place to come over him. And then he took another bar of candy from his bag and ate it, and folded the paper and put it in his pocket as before. The night chill had seeped into the church. Standing, he put on the overcoat. He picked up his bag and felt his way to the door. It had cleared, and the sky was full of stars. To the east, upriver, he could see a faint brightening ahead of the coming day. All around him the dark treetops were throbbing with birdsong, and from the banks of the two rivers at their joining, from everywhere, there was water. The voices of spring peepers rose as if in clouds. Art stood still and looked around him and listened. It was going to be the fine spring day that he had imagined it might be. He thought, if a fellow was to be dead now, and young, might be he would be missing this a long time. There was a privy in back of the church and he went to it. And then, on his way out of the lane, he stopped at the barn and drank again at the cistern. Back among the houses, still dark and silent among their trees, he took the road that led up into the smaller of the two river valleys. There was no light yet from the dawn, but by the little light of the stars he could see well enough. All he needed now was the general shape of the place, given by various shadows and loomings. I have hoofed it home from here many a night, he thought. Might be I could do it if I was blind. But I can see. He could see, and he walked along feeling the joy of a man who sees. A joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light. The quiet around him seemed wide as the whole country and deep as the sky, and the morning songs of the creatures and his own footsteps occurred distinctly and separately in it, making a kind of geography and a kind of story. As he walked, the light slowly strengthened. As he more and more saw where he was, it seemed to him more and more that he was walking his memory, or that he had entered awake a dream that he had been dreaming for a long time. He was hungry. The candy bar that he had eaten when he woke had hardly interrupted his hunger. My belly thinks my throat has been cut. It is laying right flat against my backbone. It was a joy to him to be so hungry. Hunger had not bothered him much for many weeks, had not mattered. But now it was as vivid to him as a landmark. It was a tree that puts its roots into the ground and spread its branches out against the sky. The east brightened. The sun lit the edges of a few clouds on the horizon, and then rose above them. He was walking full in its light. It had not shone on him long before he had to take off the overcoat and he folded it and rolled it neatly and stuffed it into his bag. By then he had come a long way up the road. Now that it was light, he could see the marks of the flood that had recently covered the valley floor. He could see drift logs and mats of cornstalks that the river had left on the low fields. In places where the river ran near the road, he could see the small clumps of leaves and grasses that the currents had affixed to the tree limbs. Out in one of the bottoms he saw two men with a team and wagon, clearing the scattered debris from their fields. They had set fire to a large heap of drift logs, from which the pale smoke rose straight up. Above the level of the flood the sun shone on the small, still-opening leaves of the water maples, and on the short new grass of the hillside pastures. As he went along, Art began to be troubled in his mind. How would he present himself to the ones at home? He had not shaved since before his long ride on the bus. He had not bathed. He did not want to come in after his three-year absence like a man coming in from work, unshaven, and with his clothes mussed and soiled. He must appear to them as what he had been since they saw him last, a soldier. And then he would be at the end of his soldiering. He did not yet know what he would be when he ceased to be a soldier, but when he had thought so far, his confusion left him. He came to the mouth of a small tributary valley. Where the stream of that valley passed under the road, he went down the embankment, making his way first through trees, and then through a patch of dead horseweed stalks to the creek. A little way upstream he came to a place of large, flat rocks that had been swept clean by the creek, and were now in the sun and dry. Opening the duffel bag he carefully laid its contents out on the rocks. He took out his razor and brush and soap and a small mirror, and knelt beside the stream and soaked his face and shaved. The water was cold, but he had shaved with cold water before. When he had shaved, he took off his clothes and, standing in flowing water that instantly made his feet ache, he bathed, quaking, breathing between his teeth as he raised the cold water again and again in his cupped hands. Standing on the rocks in the sun, he dried himself with the shirt he had been wearing. He put on his clean, too-large clothes, tied his tie, and combed his hair. And then warmth came to him. It came from inside himself... and from the sun outside. He felt suddenly radiant in every vein and fiber of his body. He was clean and warm and rested and hungry. He was well. He was in his own country now, and he did not see anything around him that he did not know. I have been a stranger, and have seen strange things, he thought. And now, I am where it is not strange, and I am not a stranger. He was sitting on the rocks resting after his bath. His bag, re-packed, lay on the rock beside him and he propped his elbow on it. I am not a stranger, but I am changed. Now I know a mighty power that can pass over the earth and make it strange. There are people where I have been that won't know their places when they get back to them. Them that lived to get back won't be where they were when they left. He became sleepy, and he lay down on the rock and slept. He slept more deeply than he had in the night. He dreamed he was where he was, and a great warm light fell upon that place and there was light within it, and within him. When he returned to the road after his bath and his sleep, it was past the middle of the morning. His steps fell into their old rhythm on the blacktop. I know a mighty power, he thought, a mighty power of death and fire. And anger beyond the power of any man, made big in machines equal to many men. And a little man who has passed through mighty death and fire and still lived, what is he going to think of himself when he is back again, walking the river road below Port William, that we would have blowed all to flinders as soon as look at it, if it had got in our way. He walked as before, the left side of the road, not meaning to ask for rides. But as on the afternoon before, there was little traffic. He had met two cars going down toward Hargrave, and had been passed by only one coming up. Where the road began to rise toward Port William up on the ridge, a lesser road branched off to the left and ran along the floor of the valley. As Art reached this intersection, he heard a truck engine backfiring, coming down the hill. And then the truck came into sight and he recognized it. It was an old, green International, driven as he expected, and soon saw, by a man wearing a trucker's cap and smoking a pipe. The truck was loaded with fat hogs, headed for the packing plant in Jefferson. As he went by the old man waved to Art, and Art waved back. Sam Hanks, he thought. I have been gone over three years, and have traveled many a thousand miles over land and ocean. And in all that time, in all them miles, the first man I have seen that I have always known is Sam Hanks. He tried to think what person he had seen last when he was leaving, but he could not remember. He took the lesser road, and after perhaps a mile, turned into a road still narrower, only a pair of graveled wheel tracks. A little later, when the trees were fully leaved, this would be almost a burrow, tunneling along between the creek and the hillside under the trees. But now the leaves were small, and the sun cast the shadows of the branches in a close network onto the gravel. Soon he was walking below the high water line. He could see it clearly marked on the slope to his right, a line above which the fallen leaves of the year before were still bright, and below which they were darkened by their long steeping in the flood. The slope under the trees was strewn with drift, and here and there a drift log was lodged in the branches high above his head. In the shadow of the flood, the spring was late, the buds of the trees just opening, the white flowers of twin leaf and bloodroot just beginning to bloom. It was almost as if he were walking underwater, so abrupt and vivid was the difference above and below the line that marked the crest of the flood. But somewhere, high in the sunlit branches, a red bird sang over and over, in a clear, pealing voice, "Even so, even so." And there was nothing around him that Art did not know. He knew the place in all the successions of the year, from the little blooms that came in the earliest spring to the fallen red leaves of October. From the songs of the nesting birds to the anxious wintering of the little things that left their tracks in snow. From the first furrow to the last load of the harvest. Where the creek turned away from the road, the valley suddenly widened and opened. The road still held up on the hillside, among the trees, permitting him to see, through the intervening branches, the broad field that lay across the bottom. He could see the plowing had been started. A long strip had been back-furrowed out across the field, from the foot of the slope below the road to the trees that lined the creek bank. And then he saw, going away from him, almost out to the end of the strip, two mule teams with two plowmen walking in the opening furrows. The plowmen's heads were bent to their work, their hands riding easy on the handles of the plows. Some distance behind the second plowman was a little boy, also walking in the furrow, and carrying a tin can. From time to time, he bent and picked up something from the freshly turned earth and dropped it into the can. Walking behind the boy was a large hound. The first plowman was Art's father, the second his brother, Mart. The boy was Art's sister's son, Roy Lee, who had been two years old when Art left, and was now five. The hound was probably old Bawler, who made it a part of his business to be always at work. Roy Lee was collecting fishing worms, and Art looked at the creek and saw, in an open place at the top of the bank, as he expected, three willow poles stuck into the ground, their lines in the water. The first of the teams reached the end of the plow lane, and Art heard his father's voice, clear and quiet. "Gee, boys." And then Mart's team finished their furrow, and Mart said, "Gee, Sally." They went across the headland and started back. Art stood as if looking out of his absence at them who did not know he was there, and he had to shake his head. He had to shake his head twice to persuade himself that he did not hear, from somewhere, off in the distance, the heavy footsteps of artillery rounds striding toward them. He pressed down the barbed wire at the side of the road, straddled over it, and went down through the trees, stopping at the foot of the slope. They came toward him, along the edge of the plow land, cutting it two furrows wider. Soon he could hear the soft footfalls of the mules, the tracings jingling, the creaking of the double trees. Present to himself, still absent to them, he watched them come. At the end of the furrow, his father called, "Gee!" and leaned his plow over so that it could ride around the headland on the share and right handle. And then he saw Art. "Well, now," he said, as if only to himself. "Whoa," he said to the mules, and again, "Well, now." He came over to Art and put out his hand. And Art gave him his. Art saw that there were tears in his father's eyes, and he grinned and said, "Howdy." Early Roundberry stepped back and looked at his son and said again, "Well, now." Mart came around onto the headland then and stopped his team. He and Art shook hands, grinning at each other. "You reckon your foot will still fit in a furrow?" Art nodded. "I reckon it still will." "Well, here's somebody you don't hardly know," Mart said, gesturing toward Roy Lee. "And who don't know you at all, I bet. Do you know who this fella is, Roy Lee?" Roy Lee probably did not know, though he knew he had an uncle who was a soldier. He knew about soldiers. He knew they fought in a war far away, and here was a great, tall, fine soldier in a soldier's suit, with shining buttons, and the shoes on his feet were shining. Roy Lee felt something akin to awe, and something akin to love, and something akin to fear. He shook his head, and looked down at his bare right foot. Mart laughed. "This here's your uncle Art, you know 'bout Uncle Art." To Art he said, "He's talked enough about you, he's been looking out the road to see if you was coming." Art looked up the creek and across it at the house, and the outbuildings and barn. He looked around it and the blinding blue sky over it. He looked again and again at his father and his young nephew and his brother. They stood up in their lives around him now in such a way that he could not imagine their deaths. Early Roundberry looked at his son, now and then reaching out to grasp his shoulder or his arm, as if to feel through the cloth of the uniform the flesh and bone of the man inside. "Well, now," he said again and again, "Well, now." Art reached down and picked up a handful of earth from the furrow nearest him. "You're plowing it just a little red, ain't you?" "Well, we've had a wet time," Mart said. "We felt like we had to go ahead. Maybe we'll get another hard frost. We could yet." Art said, "Well, I reckon we might." And then he heard his father's voice riding up in his throat as he had never heard it, and he saw that his father had turned to the boy and was speaking to him. "Honey, run yonder to the house. Tell your granny to set on another plate, for we have our own, that was gone, and has come again." ( applause ) >>

Meine

Thank you, Wendell. I'm having a heck of a time up here, because I was wrapped up in the story, and I've been trying to think of an initial question that I can ask after it, while you finish your questions and pass them to the volunteers. Please, this is the moment to do that. >>

Berry

I'm the designated man to answer all these questions, but I'm filled with dread. ( laughter ) >>

Meine

It's only 2,000, it's okay. And my difficulty is, Wendell is a man of many voices. You've heard many of them already in his reading, and there are many voices also in the type of writing he does, as you all well know. Some of you know him best through his essays, some through his poetry, some through his fiction. And I'm trying very hard to wonder whether I should follow up with fiction or go completely in the other direction to satisfy that half of the audience that may have come here for that. >>

Berry

Let's try to please everybody, I mean, it's always easy. ( laughter ) >>

Meine

Thank you, that helps. So I am going to just change the genre right away, to take advantage of the fact that Wendell is with us. And he, of course, comes in the aftermath of Michael Pollan's appearance in Madison recently, and I'm sure many of you had an opportunity to hear Mr. Pollan. And I know that Wendell has had opportunity as well, to be either following or coming in front of Mr. Pollan in different places. So I'm actually going to ask a pre-submitted question. A friend of mine, who is a great devotee of Mr. Berry's writing, sent me eight questions. ( laughter ) >>

Berry

Well, let's start with them. ( laughter ) >>

Meine

So I am just going to ask one of them as, again, your questions are collected and sorted and the cream rises to the top. My friend wonders, Wendell, about your reaction to this new wave of interest in the work that you have been doing for so long. Your reaction to the growth of community-supported agriculture, organic and local food, the slow food movement, the nascent slow money movement. After so many years of calling for this kind of change, through all your many voices, what is your response to where we are at the moment with all of this energy now flowing into these ideas? >>

Berry

Well, of course, I'm immensely grateful. Not too many years ago, I didn't imagine that I would ever see this happen. In fact, there was a year not too long ago, ten, fifteen years, when I was saying to myself, "Well, there's not going to be any good result. You're just going to have to go on with the support of your few friends you know, and finish it out this way." And then, in a year or two, I realized that things were going on all over the country. So, a rare thing for me, I decided I'd go around on a speaking trip and kind of encourage people, and thank them a little bit. This bunch of new people, mostly new people, not all of them, who are serving the farmer's markets. Maybe I'd better take that back, I don't know whether they're all new people or not, some of them are. The farmer's markets, the community-supported agriculture farms, and most significantly, I think, this growth of kind of an agrarian awareness in the cities. Of some kind of duty to those proxies they've given to other people to raise food for them. And so I'm just immensely grateful to have lasted long enough to see this. But at the same time that we feel a kind of relief and excitement about this, I think we ought to check ourselves and realize what immense jobs of work we have lying ahead of us, and how very hard we're going to have to work to keep our minds clear and our bodies capable to carry this on to some kind of significant conclusion. The other side is just beginning to notice us, and we've been a little dog yapping at the heels of a giant with a big club. ( laughter ) And we still are. I had the idea, I'm going to say it, with some suspicion that it might not be true, but I think that national animal identification business was maybe the first effort of big agriculture, of agribusiness, to use their friends in government to strike a meaningful blow against the small producers. I think there's going to be more than that as the farmer's markets and the CSAs begin to take market share, we're going to hear from those people. And they're not going to be the benign family folk that they've represented themselves to be. After all, I come from Kentucky. And I know what the corporations are capable of. And if you'd like to know, have a look at the mountaintop removal sites in Kentucky and West Virginia. These are people who will do anything, and we mustn't be optimistic about their character. ( applause ) Well, the other thing is that they're working against themselves. That's on our side. To that extent, to the extent that their failure is obvious to everybody, and undeniable by them, they're working for us. ( laughter and applause ) Well, now we're both going to be surprised. >>

Meine

Well, here's one, this is a good one because I was wanting to ask this myself. ( laughter ) And now I don't have to lie. I could make up questions here. ( laughter ) >>

Berry

What power, don't let it go to your head. ( laughter ) >>

Meine

As many of you in the audience know, another of the connections that Wendell Berry has to Madison, Wisconsin comes through his teacher, Wallace Stegner. And I know that we have a lot of Stegner fans in this audience because I have worked a bit myself on Stegner. So the question is simply, could you tell us what influence Wallace Stegner has had on your work? >>

Berry

Well, to answer that question I have to be more autobiographical than I really want to be. ( laughter ) But in 1958, I went to Stanford on what is known as a Stegner Fellowship. $2500 in those days. And at the time, I had no idea what my life was, in a curious way, although I had Tanya, and we had Mary, our first child. In some sense, I was still living outside my life, what had been my life at the start and what was going to be my life later, and I hope at the end. I thought, I was really a very ambitious young fellow, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a writer just desperately. And I thought that to be a writer I would probably have to be kind of a university bum. ( laughter ) Going around, teaching creative writing or some such, at universities. And what delivered me from that, ironically, was an invitation eventually to come back to Kentucky and teach creative writing at the University of Kentucky. ( laughter ) Well, anyway, when I went to Stanford in 1958, I'd never been West. I had learned surprisingly little as a student. I knew more than I knew I knew about my place and about animals and the things I'd learned at work. But I had no idea that I would become anything but what I just described to you. And so, Wallace Stegner, at that time, impressed himself upon me simply as an extraordinarily impressive, attractive man. A man of considerable humanity and kindness, also reserve. And he had a way of... what would you say, emitting a kind of a aura about himself, and if you got into that and you weren't working as hard as you could, you felt embarrassed. You knew he was working as hard as he could. And then, actually not altogether to his satisfaction, I did get invited back to Kentucky. And the next thing Tanya and I did was to buy this little old place, a hillside on the Kentucky River that I'd known all my life, and she very kindly permitted me to return to and live in. And we thought, well, this will be our weekend place, you see how extraordinarily original I was. ( laughter ) I was going to teach in the university and have a weekend place in the country. ( laughter ) And so, the old house was all to pieces. There was a corner in the kitchen where the foundation rolled under it both ways, and the corner had opened up, and the people who'd lived there before us, they just nailed fly screen over the hole. ( laughter ) So we began this, we sort of put our hands to the work, with some dear friends that we knew in Port Royal, to this house, to make it better, to save it. And in the course of that, I don't know which one of us understood it first. I might as well say Tanya understood it first because she always understands everything first. ( laughter ) It suddenly came upon us, and I can't remember where we were standing when this boat hit us, that we're not fixing up a weekend place. We're fixing a place where we're going to live. And that I would settle for that, in Kentucky, really, I think was a surprise to Mr. Stegner. And at the same time, I began to be really influenced by Mr. Stegner, because about that time, "Wolf Willow" was published. And that book, that is a wonderful book, and it has a perfectly crystalline novella at the end of it. But that was about Wallace Stegner's pilgrimage to the place of his birth, which was, of course, a frontier place and a Western place. And with that book, I began to understand him as a writer and, as far as I still know, the first writer who had looked upon his place, his region, not just as material, but as a responsibility that he would have to work for and protect. And so, as I understood and lived into that influence from him, it grew into an immensity and will always be with me. ( applause ) >>

Meine

We'll weave these threads. I'm going to follow up with another bit of autobiographical stuff if you don't mind. Stegner went west himself, around the end of World War II. So this very simple question, maybe it has a simple answer, is, where were you in 1944 or '45 at the time your story was set? >>

Berry

I was at home. I was in Henry County, where, in an odd way, and I think this would be true of any place, probably, in the country at that time. The war had just been inescapable. I had an uncle who was in the Navy. He was the only member of my family who was in the war. But he was in it with the craziest luck. He had gone to the ag school at the University of Kentucky for a few semesters, and that was on his record. And so they needed a big garden at Pearl Harbor to feed the hospital. And my uncle was put in charge of that garden, and he had a lot to learn, it was funny to hear him talk about it. But he learned a lot from an old Chinaman named Pan-chu Young, and his stories about all of that were great. But that's where he was stuck. But also, he was stuck in another way, because he had to do hospital duty, even though he was distracted by that garden and his chief effort to learn things. So it was an extraordinarily difficult thing to straddle from the garden to the hospital all through that war. So anyway, we young people were always conscious of the war because of our neighbors and kinfolk who were in it. Because of tragedies coming back from it to rest at home. And so it was never very far from my mind. And of course, we played war games, we boys, at school. We had a game in my room, we boys played a game called "Japs and Americans." And I can't remember that it had rules or anything, but anyway, it was a way we acted out our participation in this terrible, terrible time. I don't think anybody ever won that particular war. But there was a big, sort of, not a bulletin board, a kind of great sign in the courthouse yard, with all the names of all the people in Henry County, it was a small county, all the names of the people who were in the service on that board. And we would stand and look at it and find our relatives' names, and then when one of them got killed, there'd be a gold star that would go up on that name. And there were service flags in the windows. If you had one boy, or two boys, there would be a star for each boy, each son in the window. And when one of them got killed, one of those stars would turn to gold. So it was, we were very fortunate not to be fought back and forth over the top, but we were also unable ever to forget. And I might mention one other thing. We were very proud, all us boys who talked endlessly about the war, we were very proud of our country in those days, because we didn't torture prisoners. ( applause ) >>

Meine

I encourage you to read the first essay in "Citizenship Papers" again, if you haven't. I reread it again the other night, and Wendell speaks to that issue at greater length. One of the things that strikes me, listening to your story tonight, Wendell, just is how the pacing of it and the language, and especially your reading of it, embodies exactly what the story is about. The time, the place, the pace. And of course, we live in a different age and different time now, and the pace has changed, and the homecoming that veterans experience now is nothing like what it was in your time. And I say that as an introduction to this question, and to make it a little less of an abrupt shift, from your time in your story to the question, which is, "As an essayist and cultural critic who has written a fair amount about community," and we heard that, of course, in the story, "what is your view of newly-emerging digital communities? The internet based communities, etc. Are they credible forms of community? If not, why not?" >>

Berry

Well, we're just flooded with language now, which means that we've got to be careful about language. Now, you can speak in a digital community if you want to, but all I ask is that you recognize that you're using a metaphor. A real community, Aldo Leopold defined a community, it's the people and the place and everything else that's in it. ( applause ) And they're there together, and they're interdependent, and we're just trying in the most awkward way, like a bunch of children, trying to understand the extent of our responsibility toward those other neighbors that are not people we like, or that are not humans. And this is a terribly daunting job of work. The work is redeemed by the great interest there is in it. I mean, the great interest that is possibly in it for people who will apply themselves to it. How best to farm, or garden, so as to share the place, rather than tyrannize over it and ultimately destroy it. These are interesting questions, and people, good people, have spent their lives on those questions. And if they weren't fascinating questions, they couldn't have done it. Just remember that. >>

Meine

Those of you aware of the time know that we're going a little bit over, I hope that's okay with everybody. It means you might not be able to get as many books signed afterward, but it's such an opportunity. >>

Berry

We just don't want them to stay till we have to feed them. ( laughter ) ( sound crackles ) >> That's not us. >>

Meine

I hope not. Especially when it's slow food, right? Okay. Let me just do... Am I on, can you hear me? ( sound crackles ) ( laughter ) I will speak loudly. ( shouts ) Wendell, what are you writing right now? ( laughter ) >>

Berry

Well, I could say that when I'm able, I'm writing short stories because they end quicker than novels. ( laughter ) And now and then a poem for the joy of it. But I also have a schedule of dutiful work, and much of that is of real interest. Jobs that I have to do just because I have causes and allies. My big mistake was getting a lot of allies and making friends with people. ( laughter ) Don't do it, young people. ( laughter ) >>

Meine

Headline, "Wendell's Advice to Young People." >>

Berry

Don't make any friends. ( laughter ) Don't fall in love. ( laughter ) That is actually pretty good advice, but you won't take it. ( laughter ) >>

Meine

We have, I guess, one more question and then one that's almost a question. So when you said you don't like to speak the last word, but if you had to, what would it be? >>

Berry

I don't trade in that commodity of last words or what would be the thing I would tell President Obama if I could tell him something. I don't think it's reducible to anything short enough to tell the president. I don't think that I know anything that's reducible to a last word. People like to trade in that kind of stuff, but it's stuff, it really doesn't amount to very much. What really interests me is the possibility that we humans can make sense. And this is an issue, a formal issue, of the greatest urgency and gravity. What are the conditions in which we human beings can make sense? Within what limits are our minds effective? Now, I've been griping about this to some of my friends lately. We've had two generations of college-bred people now, who have really been indoctrinated with the idea that every big problem has a big solution. And I just don't believe it. ( applause ) The big problems we have now are going to be solved, if they ever are solved, by hundreds of people accepting local responsibilities for small problems. They're never going to get famous, they're never going to get tenure for this. ( laughter ) But this is the way it has to work. We're not really very smart, we humans. And the idea that somebody could come up with a big solution to a big problem is always dangerous. It always comes up with the simple, the simple solution. People who make simple solutions always make trouble. And they're always surprised by the trouble they make. ( laughter ) So, to hell with the last words. Let's try to make one sentence that's rightly positioned within a manageable context, so that we can utter it to somebody else and they'll understand it. And that we'd be then on the way to defining a job of work that we could actually do. I think - ( applause ) >>

Meine

So this last one is not a question, it's a statement, and it looks like a good one to bring this to a close on. Then I have something to give to Wendell. I'll just read it. "Wendell, thank you for your companionship and direction - for THE companionship and direction you have provided for me since I read "The Unsettling of America" when it first came out. There may be no true blood between us, but we are kin. >>

Berry

All right. ( applause ) Then how would you settle for two last words? ( laughter ) You're welcome. ( applause ) >>

Meine

Before we say a thank you back to Wendell, I have a couple of last parting gifts for our guests from Kentucky. First of all, I do want to thank Tanya for joining Wendell tonight, it's so great to have you with us as well. ( applause ) I've had the opportunity to do this a couple years running now, at the Book Festival. It's been my privilege and I've had a lot of fun doing it, because I've gotten introduced friends. So, two years ago some of you may have been in the audience when Terry Tempest Williams was here. And I had to give her something special because she had discovered in her last trip before that to Wisconsin the glory and wonder of cheese curds. ( laughter ) And I'm deeply concerned that because Wendell knows Terry Tempest Williams that they will have a conversation and she will say, "Did Curt give you cheese curds?" So the bad news is, it's not cheese curds, but it is, these are both, by the way, homegrown gifts from Sauk County, Wisconsin. So this is Carr Valley apple-smoked cheddar. >>

Berry

All right, well, thank you. ( applause ) Smoked all right. Thank you very much. >>

Meine

I figured having Wendell Berry here and not giving him some local food, I might get arrested. And this is also a homegrown product of Sauk County. I'll make the story very short. Two years ago when we finished work at the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center outside of Baraboo, we ended up having a few of the timber, a few pieces of the timber and slash left over from the trees, harvested onsite, many of them planted by Nina Bradley, right there, 75 years ago. We had just enough wood left over to mill that wood into paper. So here for Wendell, to commemorate his visit is this special edition of the "Sand County Almanac" published on paper grown by its author and his family. Thank you, Wendell Berry. ( applause ) Thank you, Wendell. >>

Berry

All right, that's very moving. That's a very moving gift. ( applause )