NATHANIEL VAN YPEREN
Fidelity: A Letter to Wendell Berry on the Twenty-Second Anniversary of Not Belonging to a Place
Dear Mr. Berry,
I woke up writing a letter to you in my head. It was the sort of waking that happens only rarely for me—the mind hot and engaged, not staggering from the dream world in all of its strangeness and irrational coherence, but spitting out sentences like dictation. (It probably has nothing to do with visiting family, or sleeping in my childhood home in the country, or anything like that). When I snapped awake, it was a breakup letter. It’s me, not you. Well, let’s be honest, it’s you too. But now, as I’ve settled down next to the wood stove, it’s becoming something else. I am not yet quite sure what.
Years ago, you helped me understand that I ought to love a place on earth so deeply and profoundly that I might come to truly understand my part in it and, in turn, know an essential part of myself. And then be at peace with both. But after all these years, I’m tired of the ache, the longing in my heart. I'm tired of feeling out of place.
Birders, as you know, talk about “spark” birds—the species that caught their interest and ignited a passion for ornithology. (Perhaps you would have something clever to say about how birding, a hobby popular among urban and suburban folks, is less about connection to the wild than a sign of our now inherent disconnection as a species. Birds, I’ve noticed, show up in your work from time to time; not as items on a list but as companions and interlocutors. Right now, as I write this, I’m thinking of that simple and marvelous encounter with the hawk in the plow field in one of your essays). Readers have “spark” reads—those pieces of writing that somehow, mysteriously and simultaneously, shatter and build—works that slow the spin of the world and shift the angle of its tilt. These days, the species of reader is dwindling, like so many migratory birds. Our numbers are down, but there are still some of us making our way through the shiny towers of technology, who are still moved by those bits of literature that say something true and lasting about the nature of reality. My own spark read is (no offense) not one of yours, but from Annie Dillard. Her little book of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk, oriented me as a reader, and in some important ways, as a thinker, and absolutely as a teacher. Another way of saying it is that she prepared me for you.
It was 1999. I was a misplaced easterner at a small college in the Pacific Northwest. I was awed by the grandeur of the geographies of the West, but on too many days I was lonely and thinking about my home place in New England. I missed the solitary mountain, the hardwood forest, the babbling brook, and the lichen on the rock walls. I missed the sound of sheep, the fragrant breezes, and the slowness of days. I missed the ways the morning sun poured through old glass panes, painting warm squares on the wood floor. So, I turned to my studies to provide identity in the new place. But when I read the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, who wrote “All actual life is encounter,” I thought of the coyotes in the backwoods, a kiss behind the summer camp building, the feeling of a basketball worn smooth from dribbling on the dirt. I wrote Buber’s line in my notebook. Then, I started to look for others who I thought measured up.
A smart and kind and funny professor found me a job as a research assistant. One day, he gave me an odd assignment to type out one of your essays into a more agreeable format in preparation for a class exercise. So there I was, almost nineteen years old, slowly tapping on my school-issued laptop— a two-inch thick Macintosh— a few paragraphs from your essay, “Why I will Not Buy A Computer.” The irony was delicious.
Like a medieval monk, I copied the text slowly and carefully. I have become a decent typist but I have always been a faithful reader. I wanted to make sure I got you right, that each word was in its right place. It was a chance encounter, but from that day on, you were a constant companion. My college sweetheart had read more of you than I had, so your books eventually became a glue in our young marriage, and your ideas about fidelity to the land became our family doctrine. We were converts to a way of thinking that strives, in all things, to be rooted and connected, to places and animals and people of particular places. We saw, with your help, that epistemology is not indifferent to geography, that where and how we live shapes how we think, and how we think in turn shapes how we live, and ultimately, what we will love and protect. For a few years, we worked low-level jobs in the mountains and mill towns of the home place. We made plans for a small farm.
We wanted to be stickers, not boomers. But neither my love nor I came from farming stock. So we did what we could with what we had and what we knew: loves and ideas. We packed up our books and drove them to a foreign and exotic land of graduate school. Our plan for the farm gradually morphed to a hope for a faculty job in a rural setting, or even in a city within reach of more wild and arable land. We would live out our ideals alternately on the land and in the seminar room, passing on our love of books and ideas and the land to future generations.
As graduate students, we tried our best to live into agrarian ideals in a small, second-floor apartment. We hosted poetry parties and refinished old furniture. On an adjacent, flat roof, I grew heirloom tomatoes in pots and, after we had our first child, we hung cloth diapers to dry in the sun on homemade wooden racks. That is, until we were fined by our landlord and warned to stay off the roof. We taught ourselves how to be scratch cooks. We spent our modest teaching stipends on farm shares to support the local economy and eat food that was fresh from the earth. We walked everywhere, even in the rain. We kept adding your books to our bookshelves. Next year on a farm, we hoped.
Once, you might like to know, I nearly fought for your honor. I was in a seminar on theological method and continental philosophy. No one else cared about farms, and certainly not my head-in-the-clouds professor. A very smart colleague was on yet another one of his jags on the latest theory. I tried to answer his cynicism with an interpretation of some theme or another from your work. I think, in retrospect, I was using you to shield him from me, or me from my own insecurity. In any case, when he dismissed my idea as “bourgeois” (with a sneer, no less!)I felt a powerful urge to climb over the table and bash his head in the manner of one of his beloved revolutionaries. I held back, but I’m sure if you had been a French philosopher, he would have been more hospitable to your ideas. Later, in a different seminar room with a different professor and different colleagues, we talked about how your book, The Hidden Wound, was the best book about race written by a white person.
My wife and I finished our PhD theses. Both projects, which each eventually became academic books, featured your work throughout. (If you have an extra ninety dollars lying around, you can purchase mine from Lexington Books. We could use the business). Your own publishing press granted me permission, for a small fee, to quote in my book from your beautiful and heartbreaking poem “VI” from the collection Leavings. I’ve taught that poem in all of my classes since I first heard it at your Jefferson Lecture in Washington, D.C. We sat in the second row with dear friends, and wiped away tears as we listened to your words on the heaven of creatures and pain as the measure of love. Another time, I heard you read the poem in your own voice when your scholar-friend, Norman Wirzba, ambushed you with the request at a session of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
Since then, I’ve read it with hundreds of students in colleges, graduate schools, and now at an independent high school. It’s such a lovely piece, and it distills themes that run through all of your works. It took me a few years to read it through cleanly; that is, without my voice breaking at the line when you say that you would like to know and remember your wife in her youth and how you still love her in old age. All that practice in my classrooms paid off a few years ago when I read the poem at my grandparent’s joint memorial service and held the line. They were imperfect people, sinners like you and me, but they were married for nearly seventy years and died within two months of each other. They spent most of their adult lives looking over a place, all of its changes, all of its seasons. They could have been characters in one of your novels. The poem still helps me see that our loves are already and always bound to losses—affection bears the promise of suffering. Such are the conditions of this beautiful and terrifying creaturely life. We cannot love without vulnerability. To be fully human is to be hospitable to this tragic and inextricable relationship of losses and loves. You cannot love God and money, Jesus said. You cannot love an abstract heaven and the world of creatures, you said. You can’t always get what you want, the Rollings Stones said.
The trouble is this: for more than twenty years, I have been reading your books, gifting your books, teaching your ideas, and striving to live into simple and timeless practices of fidelity, intention, and trust—rooted in place. Your novels, poems, and essays are about promises we make to one another, to God, to nation, and importantly, to the land. It’s the last one I’m stuck on. Because, like so many people of my generation, I haven’t been able to stay in one place. For twenty years I have been trying or longing to get back to a patch of land in New England.
Scholars and teachers in the humanities don’t get to choose where they live. The few of us who have found rocks to stand on are wary of ever entering the current again. After our studies, my wife and I followed the only jobs to the Upper Midwest, had another kid, and then followed my wife’s new job back East six years later. All the while, we ached, yearned, hoped, and sometimes despaired over the idea of the unrealized home place. We grew a kitchen garden and welcomed backyard chickens. Still, we have been trying to make it back to a place we love, “a center of power,” to borrow a phrase from Gary Snyder. I know, too, that I’m already too late to point out that I enjoy so many privileges that most in our unequal society will never know. I don’t presume to deserve more than I have. I’m not ungrateful. I just don’t know where to put my longing to love, to truly belong to a home place.
As it happens, I have neither the work ethic nor the genius to make it as a writer—to abandon the security of institutions for the open pasture of a writing life—like you did. Some of us, (well, let’s still be honest), most of us who read, love, and teach your books can’t fully embrace the ideals that animate your work. I spend my days performing the routines of academic calendars, teaching in climate-controlled buildings, and working with students who believe that new Teslas and faithful recycling will solve the climate crisis. I urge these students (usually with some sense of resignation) to love your sentences and to embrace your ideas of an authentic life of encounter on the land.
So, Mr. Berry, I don’t know what else to do. I am tired of feeling out of place. I don’t know what to do with those feelings that arise, unbidden and strong, when I draw near to the places that I love (after six hours of burning fossil fuels to get north of the cities). At what point must we say farewell to some of the geographies of our moral imagination, so that we can, maybe, live in some peace without feeling pulled in and out of place? Every road trip has become a pilgrimage that reopens the wound and makes me feel like I’ve failed to realize the life that you helped me describe for myself. Besides, have you seen the price of land these days?
You inaugurated an ideal in my imagination of what it could mean to watch over a place, in all the seasons of our lives. But I haven’t made it there yet. Perhaps it’s the anticipated “yet” that’s been the problem—the yearning after something other than the present. Maybe that future-oriented yet is a trap that leads to a tendency to dislocate. I have to remember that you can be a sticker anywhere you find yourself. I’ve been to Aldo Leopold’s shack in Baraboo. It wasn't much.
A few months ago, I was sitting in the shade after working in our suburban backyard. The swaying zinnias caught my eye. Then I noticed them, a pair, the way a friend’s face emerges from a crowd. Two goldfinches perched sideways on the stems of the waist-high flowers. They pecked at seeds. The weight of the birds, high on the stems, made the flowers move to new music, a breezy undulation suited for late summer. They rode with the nonchalance of cowboys. “Look at the birds of the air," Jesus said, "they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them." Maybe fidelity is always, importantly, for the already—wherever you are. Maybe, like so many other questions of middle age, it comes down to accepting your place.
With affection,
Nate