Wendell and Gloria

"From a human point of view, the difference between the mind of a human and that of a mountain goat is wonderful; from the point of view of the infinite ignorance that surrounds us, the difference is not impressive. Indeed, from that point of view, the goat may have the better mind, for he is more congenially adapted to his place, and he would not endanger his species or his planet for the sake of an idea."

-Wendell Berry

This year feels, at some level, like a string of significant losses, a generation leaving us at a moment when we could use all the wisdom we can get. This week we lost two great voices, Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem, both gone at 92.

I first encountered Berry at seminary.

Up on God's Holy Mountain, the Domain at Sewanee, Berry's work came up frequently as we thought and meditated on the principles of stewardship, of simple living, of loving creation for creation's sake. Berry not only wrote about those things, but lived them--he wrote in a room with no electricity and no computer. He farmed his property in rural Kentucky using draft horses. And by all appearances he kept at the project of paying attention as the world revealed itself there on his farm his entire life.

Somewhere on one of these shelves I have a book or two of his essays. I don't see them up there--I guess they're back at Wyldswood with the rest of my library from my religious years.

And as I consider it, the fact that his books are sitting at Wyldswood seems not to be a coincidence. In Berry's NYT obit, there's a line from an early book about his return from teaching at NYU to the farm where he and his wife would spend the rest of their lives:

“In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted — and it was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige."

That could well describe P and me during that summer of the pandemic, staying inside the gates of Wyldswood, growing vegetables, watching calves skip (that's actually a thing, and not something concocted in Psalm 29:6), enjoying our time together on a very human scale and schedule. I'd actually been thinking of finding another book of his essays to read, as we try to discern how to navigate out of the doldrum we've created for ourselves, when I heard of his passing.

Gloria Steinem, on the other hand, was a bogeyman of my childhood.

My father hated all things feminist, couldn't stand my mother's lady friends from college, said out loud in front of his young son that women were only good for one thing, then proceeded to name that act. So that was our household. And Gloria Steinem in those days represented the walking embodiment of the women's movement when there was such a thing.

So I guess the fact that I find myself mourning her passing and the passing of what she stood for represents something of an evolution for me. Turns out, she was right about pretty much everything when it came to the way our country treated women, and still does. It's hard to explain why we don't have an Equal Rights Amendment in 2026, and just last week a female government contractor was bounced out of court after it was established that the commander of a naval vessel on which she was serving raped her, because the unzipped O-6 was "acting within the scope of his employment" and the sexual assault, therefore, was subject to workers' comp immunity.

https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-08-25/lawsuit-workers-comp-sexual-assault-navy-ship-22658787.html

Gloria, where are you when we really need you? Just another day in revanchist America, I guess.

Back to work. Yesterday ended up a shambles after a bunch of interruptions and a printer failure (a setback Wendell wouldn't have ever experienced), and another writing deadline looms large on the horizon.