The great American farmer, philosopher, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was ninety-two.
During the course of more than six decades, Berry wrote dozens of books of poetry, fiction, and essays, becoming one of America’s most distinctive voices on agriculture, nature, community, and the underappreciated costs of modern life. President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and in 2012 Berry delivered the Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Less recognized has been one of Berry’s important cultural gifts: his profound understanding of what it means to belong in an age of so much isolation.
Most of us tend to think of belonging primarily in social terms—like friendship, community, inclusion, acceptance. For Berry, belonging meant rootedness. It meant recognizing our dependence on other people and the natural world. And, crucially, it meant accepting the responsibilities that come with that dependence.
I first encountered these insights when I visited Wendell and his wife, Tanya, at their home in Kentucky. I sat with Wendell surrounded by hundreds of books, sipping iced tea and listening to birdsongs coming from the front yard on their farm, Lanes Landing, where they lived among oak, walnut, and maple trees in the green rolling hills near where the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers meet. The Berrys’ home was radically liberated from computers and smartphones and filled instead with books on everything from Renaissance literature to ecology, theology, and fine arts. Almost immediately upon arriving there, I felt time slow down.
Wendell and Tanya had met as students at the University of Kentucky in the 1950s. After years of what he described as “wandering about”—including prestigious stretches in academic life in the United States and Europe—they returned to the area where his family had lived and farmed for generations.
For more than half a century, they immersed themselves in that place: raising a family, tending sheep, farming, writing, and showing up for people in their community. His work drew from the land around him, his faith, his family, and the people he knew.
Most of Berry’s writing feels, to me, like a prayer of gratitude to the place he called home.
“When we bought this place and realized it should be our home,” he told me, “we made a submission to this place’s claim on us. That kind of thing changes you.”
Then he said something I’ve never forgotten: “This place is not ours, but we are its.”
That simple but counterintuitive statement holds so many important lessons on what it means to belong, especially in times of so much disconnection from nature and social atomization. It’s not ultimately about what belongs to us—my house, my land, my community, my country. Berry asked us to consider what we belong to—and what obligations flow from that.
Berry had a particular word for the place where he lived. He rarely called it his farm. He called it his homeplace. “Prepositions have always meant a lot to me,” he said. “The homeplace is where you’re from.”
In our conversation, Berry noted that one of the first questions people ask strangers often is, “Where are you from?” It’s a serious question. The answer reveals something about a person—including the landscape that has shaped them, the culture they embrace, the people they know, perhaps the work their family does, and the stories they inherit.
In a mobile and globalized culture, Berry observed, the question can seem quaint or even irrelevant. Most of us are all absorbing the same culture these days. People move for school and work. We might work for employers thousands of miles away. Food shows up on store shelves from places we’ll never see. Much of our social and economic life takes place through screens and speakers. He pointed out that many people can say they aren’t really “from” anywhere in particular.
Yet Berry believed we lose something when our relationship to place becomes interchangeable.
Today, the consequences of disconnection are increasingly hard to overlook. We’re facing a global crisis of social isolation. While the typical responses to problems like loneliness and polarization tend to center on connecting more with other people or joining organizations or clubs, Berry’s thinking centers on a more profound question: How do we build a society where we recognize that we truly need one another and that we need nature?
Berry called this “responsible dependence.”
“There is no such thing as autonomy,” he wrote in his most famous book, The Unsettling of America. “Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.”
When I asked him what he meant by this, Berry smiled and said: “I am dependent upon Tanya. And because I am dependent upon her, I want her to last! That means I must do the best I can to care for her and make sure that she remains.”
Then he gestured toward the world outside.
“It’s the same with our place here. I want it to last.”
Wendell Berry died in the homeplace to which he had devoted most of his adult life. There is something poignant in that.
His legacy will rightly encompass vital work in sustainable agriculture, conservation, poetry, literature, faith, and his persistent critique of an economy that too often treats people and nature as mere abstractions. Yet underneath so much of it was a powerful proposition about belonging.
We are dependent beings. We need other people. We need the places that sustain us. And those relationships make claims upon us in return.
Perhaps the deepest question of belonging, then, isn’t simply “Where do I belong?” Or even “What belongs to me?” In times of isolation, it’s essential to contemplate a deeper question: “To what do I belong?”
The author wishes to thank Mary Ellen Armstrong for her help on the piece.