The Art of Loading Brush by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Essays
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

The Order of Loving Care

By now many of Andy Catlett’s mentors and old schoolmates among the writers, in Kentucky and elsewhere, have left the visible world to take their places only in the convocation of his mind. With that company of friends, while it lasted, he carried on a many-branched conversation that he had grown into and so had grown up in his trade.

But his growth had been slow, and it had taken a long time. He was not fully grown up as a writer until he was fully grown as a man. For that he had to accept and own the influence of his grandfather Catlett and of his father, of his father’s deliberate teaching, of the example of Elton Penn, of his conversations with Elton that had helped him to understand his grandfather and his father. These were the articulate ones, who spoke, as Andy would realize, not only for themselves, but also for those among their neighbors who put their agrarianism mostly into practice rather than words.

That influence, complex and profound as it was, lay in his mind only half awake and nearly speechless until he had come home, settled with his family on the Harford place, and knew that he would stay. And then at last he began consciously to inherit from that familial and local lineage the tradition, the agrarianism, ancient as he eventually would know it to be, that was theirs and now was his—his own, not because he had chosen it, but because it apparently had chosen him.

Once he was at home and committed, married to his marriage to Flora, their marriage then married to what had become its place, then a sort of providence, or so it seemed, began to work in his behalf.

In the years following his homecoming, Andy and Henry, his brother, began an alliance and collaboration founded of course upon liking and pleasure but also, more and more consciously, upon their father’s passion for land conservation, for grass and grazing, and his agrarian politics. Their conversation on these subjects lasted until Henry’s death in 2016. But for some years still after the middle 1960s these subjects, so far as Andy knew, were only local. They had not entered at all into any of his schooling. Agrarianism had no standing or presence at his alma mater, the state’s land-grant university. Nor was it to be found, so far as Andy could discover, in the agricultural bureaucracy. It had been there once, as he knew from his reading, but it was there no more. In his own experience, the ways, values, subjects, passions, and politics of agrarian culture belonged only to his conversations with his father, his brother, and Elton Penn.

And then in 1970, Andy met Gene Logsdon, who was living in Philadelphia, working improbably for Farm Journal, but who belonged to his family’s land in Wyandot County, Ohio, where from his childhood he had learned farming and the love of farming, most speakingly from his mother, and where in a

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