Wendell Berry and the Promise of the Deep Life

Wendell Berry died last week at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he farmed his land using traditional techniques and wrote with pencil and paper in a cabin lacking electricity. Berry was celebrated for his polemics against industrial agriculture and his elegiac tributes to family farms and small-town living. But for those with no direct connection to food production or ability to move to a rural enclave, Berry’s example points toward a broader lesson: the great satisfactions of living one’s life on purpose. As a young man, Berry set out on a path toward an elite academic career. Soon after earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Kentucky, he headed to Stanford to study creative writing, followed by a stint in Italy and France (funded by a Guggenheim fellowship). He later took a professorship at New York University’s Heights campus in the Bronx. Along the way, he got married and had two kids. This was the situation he found himself in when, in 1964,…