Tag Archives: Wendell Berry

The World-Ending Fire

Posted on January 3, 2023 by smellincoffee

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry© 2018 Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth360 pages What a way to finish 2022, in reading this superb collection of Wendell Berry’s essays.  Berry has published no small amount of essay collections himself, and … Continue reading →

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Turn off, tune out, and drop in

Posted on December 30, 2022 by smellincoffee

We can get rid of the television set. As soon as we see that the TV cord is a vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household, we can unplug it. What a grand and neglected privilege it … Continue reading →

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A year’s end…

Posted on December 28, 2022 by smellincoffee

Welcome to the liminal space between  the years, as we all recover from Christmas and brace ourselves for a weekend full of fireworks.  Reading activity is definitely ebbing down for me,  and has been for much of December — I’ve … Continue reading →

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A Christmas Tease

Posted on December 27, 2022 by smellincoffee

It is Tuesday, isn’t it? Christmas and the holidays have me in a temporal mist. Teasing from Wendell Berry’s The World Ending Fire again, because I haven’t been reading anything else. (Definitely in siesta mode!) As a people, we have … Continue reading →

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Teasin’ with W.B. again

Posted on December 20, 2022 by smellincoffee

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have … Continue reading →

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Teasday Tuesing with W.B.

Posted on December 13, 2022 by smellincoffee

This morning’s tease comes from a Wendell Berry anthology, The World-Ending Fire. The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is … Continue reading →

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The Memory of Old Jack

Posted on October 24, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Memory of Old Jack© 1974 Wendell Berry223 pages “Now Old Jack, who was the last of that generation that Wheeler looked to with such fililial devotion, is dead. And Wheeler is fifty-two years old, as old as the century, … Continue reading →

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Unsettled America

Posted on July 19, 2017 by smellincoffee

Last week I read Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, on the subject of agriculture and culture. Its title is apt, because Berry believes that the triumph of industrialism — as it has turned farms into agribusinesses, and America from … Continue reading →

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A Place in Time

Posted on July 2, 2017 by smellincoffee

A Place in Time© 2013 Wendell Berry256 pages Come again to Port William (and vicinity), a community — a membership — on the banks of the river.  A Place in Time collects twenty stories of the community, all  of varying lengths, … Continue reading →

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The Peace of Wild Things

Posted on December 11, 2016 by smellincoffee

When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on … Continue reading →

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