Reading Wendell Berry this morning made me feel guilty I wasn’t doing more for my community, my state, my world.
If you’re wondering, “Who’s this Berry guy?”, the back cover of The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry describes him as “an essayist, novelist, and poet.” Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal.
But most important, surely, to him, he’s a farmer and husband in Henry County, Kentucky and cares about how we care for the world. “… Berry is a prophet of the domestic. These essays are about how to make a household here on earth” (Dean Kuipers, Los Angeles Review of Books).
He also writes about talk. In “The Work of Local Culture,” a friend recalls, “There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as ‘sitting till bedtime.’ After supper, …neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, … ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. ... When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. ... They had everything but money.”
Berry reflects, “They were poor, ... but they had each other’s comfort when they needed it, and they had their stories, their history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have much. And most people of the present can only marvel to think of neighbors entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported pleasure.”
It’s no surprise that Health Day reports, “Half of young Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 spend at least four hours each day on their smartphones, computers or televisions” (healthday.com, October 2024).
Does that let parents and grandparents off the hook? Hardly. The more we rely on our phones, laptops, and TVs to escape ourselves, our loneliness, the sooner we die.
Take it from Harvard University: “Socializing is tied to reduced risks of early death.” In one study, “the more people socialized, the longer they lived. Each of the following groups lived longer than the one before it: those who socialized occasionally, monthly, weekly, or every day. People in any of these groups lived longer than those who did not socialize at all” (health.harvard.edu July 1, 2023).
Even though I’ve got a “stable of doctors” (as my brother calls it), and a trough full of prescription meds, I’ve taken to the road to meet people. Sometimes, “It don’t come easy,” as Ringo Starr sang years ago, for an introverted writer like me, but I’ve seen the writing on the tomb wall.
There are plenty of groups to discover at libraries and bookstores — or start your own, say, breakfast club. In fact, my wife, Tia, along with a few friends, formed their own book discussion group.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. They chose a book to read, met at each other’s houses for dinner, and talked a lot. If mention of the book’s title came up by chance over the tiramisu, well, fine for five, ten minutes, then back to “I’ll have another splash of cab, please, and what’s Maggie doing after Brown?”
Or reach out to friends not seen for a while. Recently, I called my old boarding school roommate, now living in Nevada.
“Hi, Rick. I’m just eating my oatmeal at the Senior Center. We have sixteen cakes donated for the raffle today. I went to look at them. Sixteen, can you believe it?”
Sure, I can. Most people are kind.
Gotta go. I’m finishing Bob Newhart’s memoir for a “Humor” book discussion group at the St. Charles library. Seriously! Instead of aspirin, I’ll take two chapters and call a friend in the morning.
• Rick Holinger’s chapbook of poetry, Down from the Sycamores, is available at Amazon and http://finishinglinepress.com. His short fiction collection, Unimaginable Things, is forthcoming in winter 2026. North of Crivitz (poetry), and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences(essays) are available at local bookstores and Amazon. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com. More information at richardholinger.com.