I feel that I ought to say something about what Wendell Berry has meant to me, but I am struggling to articulate it — partly because some family health difficulties are consuming my attention, but also because the debt is deep. Once, in the early 1990s, I was talking with a grad-school friend at a wedding and describing my abiding fascination with Berry, whom I had discovered when, in 1982, I picked up a copy of Standing By Words on the books-possibly-to-be-reviewed table at the offices of the Virginia Quarterly Review. “But,” my friend stammered, “he’s a … a … conservative.” “Yes and no,” I replied. That’s probably where I would start. With that, and with the comment that he is one of the very few contemporary writers I have been reading constantly for more than forty years.
