cc  >> Alison Jones Chaim:  I'm the director  of the Wisconsin Book Festival,  and this is really amazing.  (applause)  Welcome to our first  event in Overture Hall.  And a humongous amount of thanks  straight off the bat to the  Overture Center for the Arts for  having us.  We just love being your  houseguests every year.  And this is so special, it's  just amazing.  On behalf of the Wisconsin  Humanities Council, I would like  to welcome you to this  afternoon's keynote event.  We wouldn't be here without many  generous sponsors.  So I'd like to thank a moment to  thank them.  This evening's very special  event was made possible by  partnership with the  Aldo Leopold Foundation.  (applause)  Other generous contributors  include our presenting sponsors,  who include the American Girl  Fund for Children,  Isthmus, without whom  we wouldn't have known where to  go, the Overture Center for the  Arts who I already mentioned,  IMS -  (phone vibrates)  Ooh, that's what happens when  your phone's on vibrate on the  podium. 

 (laughter)  Sorry.  I thought it was all  taken care of.  IMS, who power our website, and  the National Endowment for the  Humanities.  There are dozens of other  organizations and hundreds of  individuals who contribute their  time and funds.  If you would like to join them  by making a contribution to the  Wisconsin Book Festival, we do  have donation envelopes  available in the main lobby.  This year, you may already, if  you've attended any Book  Festival events, have been given  little orange raffle ticket  entry cards, and that's our way  of saying thank you to all of  you, although it'll only be some  of you.  Because the winners of the  raffle will get signed books by  some of our esteemed authors,  including Mr. Berry.  We'll be announcing those  winners by email and on our  website tomorrow, so there's not  a drawing today, no one has to  be present.  If you didn't yet enter, we'd  love to have an orange ticket  entry from you, and you can also  find those on the tables out  front.  We have Rainbow Bookstore. 

 (applause)  Hooray for Rainbow.  (applause)  Selling books outside, some  of you probably picked them up.  After the event, Mr. Berry will  be signing books, so please make  sure that you support the  booksellers by picking one up  and get something to keep  forever and ever and to give to  your children.  Without the booksellers there  would be no book festival, so we  really appreciate your ability  to support them.  A couple of other thank-yous  from me personally to my  esteemed colleagues at the  Wisconsin Humanities Council.  I couldn't do any of this  without all of you, I really  appreciate everyone going above  and beyond every single year.  (applause)  To our volunteer coordinator,  Cynthia Schuster,  who coordinated all of the  wonderful volunteers, who are  next on the list to be thanked,  thank you, volunteers, you are  the face and the glue of the  Wisconsin Book Festival.  Without you, it wouldn't happen.  Let's give them a round of  applause.  (applause)  And now, I am very happy  to present, from  the Aldo Leopold Foundation,  Buddy Huffaker, and from the  Wisconsin Humanities Council,  Dena Wortzel. 

 (applause)  >> Dena Wortzel: Thank you all,  and needless to say,  we really wouldn't be here  without Alison,  so thank you, Alison.  (applause)  Well, welcome, thank you all  so much for being here  this afternoon, this is such a  special event.  In fact, this is an event that  I've imagined for the last eight  years since we had the first  Wisconsin Book Festival.  Though my love of Wendell  Berry's work goes back much  farther, back to when I was a  city girl who fell in love with  a horse and a man and a farm.  But Mr. Berry's work spoke to me  then, back when I was a city  girl, as it speaks to me now,  and as I'm sure it has spoken to  all of you who've come here from  near and far to be with him  today.  I'm so grateful to our friends  from the Aldo Leopold  Foundation, on whose behalf  Mr. Berry has come to Wisconsin.  When the Wisconsin Humanities  Council made a commitment  several years ago to help folks  here in Wisconsin think more  deeply about the relationship  between our communities and the  land upon which we depend, we  knew that Aldo Leopold would be  one of our touchstones.  As the Humanities Council  carries forward the initiative  that we're calling "Wisconsin:  Making it Home," we're helping  Wisconsin citizens be newly  inspired by our legacy as a home  to Leopold and to Muir and to  other visionaries of the land.  We're trying to stir up  conversation with people across  the state, involving people like  urban farmer Will Allen, who was  here in Madison with us  recently.  (applause)  Yeah, we love Will. 

 And people like author and  conservationist Curt Meine who's  going to be here, and you'll  hear from him in a moment  introducing Mr. Berry.  And of course, most notably,  involving our special guest here  this afternoon.  Every time has its poets and its  moral guides whose words turn  the world around for us and draw  us close to the heart of  something that perhaps we'd only  previously glimpsed.  Wendell Berry is such a writer  and a thinker, and so to  introduce him to you, I'm going  to turn this over to my friend  and our colleague Buddy  Huffaker.  >> Buddy Huffaker: Hi, I'm Buddy  Huffaker, executive director of  the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and  on behalf of everybody at the  foundation, I want to just say  how pleased and proud we are to  be once again part of the book  festival, so thank you Dena,  Alison, and all of you at the  Wisconsin Humanities Council.  Well, wow, what a welcome for  Wendell.  Deservedly so.  (applause)  I also want to take a moment  to welcome Tanya Berry,  his wife, who so graciously  joined him, and is seated...  (applause)  Who is seated with the matriarch  of the Leopold community,  Nina Leopold Bradley.  (applause)  Wendell, I told you  that this was going to be  a warm crowd here, see?  I also want to extend thanks to  everybody who is a member and  supporter of the Wisconsin  Humanities Council and the Aldo  Leopold Foundation. 

 It is not an overstatement to  say that we would not exist  without your generous support.  And it is your generosity that  makes programs like this  possible.  So we thank you.  For those of you who are not at  this point a part of our  community, we invite you and  encourage you to formally become  part of that community, there  will be opportunities for you  out in the lobby, and it really  is important as we come together  and build this collective  network of people that share the  values that bring us all here  together today.  My last little piece of business  is to introduce the individual  who's going to introduce  Mr. Berry.  You guys know how all this goes,  so we appreciate your patience.  But we have in our midst the  special privilege of having  Dr. Curt Meine work in our  community and advance these very  same kind of concepts about the  relationship between people and  land.  And many of you probably know  Curt personally, if you don't,  you probably know him as one of  the biographers of Aldo Leopold,  as the author  of "Correction Lines,"  perhaps as a community organizer  and activist in Sauk City,  working to ensure the future  of the Badger Army  Ammunitions Plant.  He's a director for the Center  for Humans and Nature, one of  our other great partners, and  kind of philosophical think tank  and community action  organization with offices in  New York, Chicago,  South Carolina,  and I'm also pleased  to announce,  outposts in Salina, Kansas  and Baraboo, Wisconsin.  Some of you can probably connect  the constellation there. 

 Curt is also a senior fellow at  the Aldo Leopold Foundation.  I've had the privilege to work  with him over the last 13 years,  to advance the vision and values  of Aldo Leopold.  Most currently we are working on  the first high-quality  documentary about Leopold's  life, titled "Green Fire," which  will feature Leopold's life and  legacy, and we hope to bring  that to you next year in 2010,  so keep your eyes and ears open.  Without further ado, Curt and  our program for this afternoon.  (applause)  >> Curt Meine: Thank you, Buddy,  and thank you to all  my colleagues and to the book  festival for what is for me a  very special opportunity and  honor.  I have to do one bit of  housekeeping, you all got those  little cards, I think, when you  came in?  That's to write any questions  down that you might have for our  guest tonight.  As at the end of the  presentation, those cards will  be collected if you do have a  question, and my good colleagues  will sort through for the very  best of them to make sure it's a  good question.  We're doing this in order to  hopefully make it more efficient  so there's more time and more  opportunity to take advantage of  Wendell Berry's being with us.  So think on those questions as  we're going forward and after  the presentation, they'll be  collected by volunteers, okay?  Thank you.  So. 

 Although our guest tonight and I  have only met a handful of times  over the years, I've grown up as  I know many of you have, with  tonight's speaker.  Starting 30 some years ago when  I, as an undergraduate, I think,  began to first read and  appreciate Wendell Berry.  And for me he has been like a  family elder who you don't see  that often, but you do grow up  with.  He has always been there as a  part of an extended clan that I  have felt a continual kinship  with, that I have identified  with, that I've defended, that  I've, in my own way, tried to  contribute to.  At some times I've rebelled  against, and sometimes I've  walked away from it.  But I've always come home again.  And when I've come home to the  clan, there has always been  Wendell Berry.  This morning I had another  opportunity to introduce Wendell  and I said, "There's Wendell."  And I left it at that,  and truly that is  enough introduction.  I will say just a bit more this  evening.  Wendell and I have had a little  correspondence in the last  month, I've asked him to assist  me in a project I'm working  with, and I asked him if he  would be willing to contribute  an introduction. 

 He did write me back and he said  in his letter, "Since I'm trying  to swear off introductions,  we may have to call it  something like  an 'appreciation.'"  So I am not going to  introduce Wendell Berry, I'm  going to appreciate him a little  bit.  And everyone here tonight,  I know, would have your own  expression of appreciation or  else you would not be here.  Here are a few of mine.  As an organism, alive on the  earth, I appreciate Wendell  Berry's willingness and ability  to think, write, speak, and live  as a fellow organism, alert to  the things and relationships  that we need to keep well this  earth.  As an organism that has been  known to occasionally eat, I  appreciate Wendell Berry's  career-long commitment to the  health of our soils, our bodies,  our landscapes, our body  politic, our economies, our  culture, our language, our  communities, and to understand  that there's ties that bind them  all together.  As a writer I appreciate  Wendell Berry's breadth, his  craftsmanship, his commitment  personal and literary to place.  I appreciate the example he's  provided of a writer not  constricted by that commitment  but liberated by it.  I appreciate that he has spoken  for and from rural places,  albeit with his eyes wide open  to the changing realities of  rural life.  As a reader, I appreciate his  clarity and again, his  craftsmanship.  I appreciate that even when I  find myself disagreeing with  Wendell, that's not that often,  but occasionally  I'll read something and have  to question it, I do so in a way  that sharpens and clarifies  my own thoughts. 

 I appreciate in that way  the respect that Wendell Berry  gives his readers.  I appreciate a couple specifics  that I'm going to take advantage  of this moment to mention.  I appreciate his book  "The Hidden Wound," not one  that many of even his own fans  have read, perhaps.  It was an early, unique,  remarkable statement in  exploration at the intersection  of history, race, identity,  land, work, literature,  and justice.  It's a remarkable book, I just  got a chance backstage to thank  him for writing that one.  And I appreciate on a little  smaller scale this line from  "Manifesto: The Mad Farmers'  Liberation Front."  I appreciate this line.  "Be joyful though you have  considered all the facts."  (laughter and applause)  As a conservationist,  I appreciate  the immeasurable contributions  Wendell Berry has made  to our efforts,  our collective efforts,  to create a more just,  sustainable community.  I appreciate his notion that we  have to solve for pattern, from  an essay of Wendell Berry's.  His understanding that to solve  any of the multiple crises that  are now converging and  synergistically creating the    perfect storm, that we have to  go forward in ways that we find  solutions that aren't just  piecemeal.  That the solutions we are  striving for have to solve many  problems simultaneously and not  create new ones as we do so. 

 Finally, as a fellow citizen,  I appreciate  Wendell Berry's courage.  That is the theme on the poster  of the book festival.  Wendell Berry's willingness  to be an independent voice,  I appreciate his acuity,  his consciousness,  his conscience.  Especially in these last  eight years.  I think I've kept this book,  "Citizenship Papers," by my  bedside for the last five years  since it was published.  Most of all I appreciate  his and Tanya's willingness  to take a few days away  from Kentucky  to come to Wisconsin.  I appreciate what it is to be  away from a farm in October.  It's not easy.  This, as I understand it, is  Wendell's first full visit to  Madison.  And I know he's been to  Wisconsin before, but this is  the first opportunity really  we've had to welcome him on a  nice, clear, brisk October  Sunday. 

 So please join me in welcoming  to Madison, to Wisconsin, and  to the Wisconsin Book Festival,  Wendell Berry.  (applause)  >> Wendell Berry:  Well, Curt, thank you.  The embarrassment of such an  introduction is that I would  like to praise your for it,  but I dare not say  that I agree with you.  (laughter)  In fact, your admission that  you sometimes disagree with me  is probably the most important  thing you said,  because a writer's freedom  depends on somebody being there  to disagree with him.  The older I get  the less I want the last word.  And I think it's a great,  healthy, invigorating feeling  that you're going to say what  you have to say the best you  can, but everybody's  not going to agree.  That's a relief.  And I must say,  I appreciate this audience,  you people in Wisconsin  are going to send me home  badly spoiled.  Sometimes I can't even get the  dog to listen to me at home.  (laughter)  By happy coincidence,  your theme  is "Making it Home,"  and a number of years ago  I wrote a short story  called "Making it Home,"  so I didn't have  to think too long about what  I would do when I got here. 

 This is a story set in 1945,  a year that's, since 1945,  never been very far  from my mind.  Even when I was young and didn't  understand as much as I needed  to about it.  I just read a book by the  historian John Lukacs  called "1945."  He called it the "year zero."  The year of great geographical  and political changes, changes  of political and geographical  configuration.  And he's good on the subject.  For me, 1945 has been a kind of  fulcrum year.  It's the year of the end of  World War II, of course.  But it's also the year when we  became free to turn our great  technical power that we had  generated in order to win the  war upon our own landscapes.  To apply that terrible doctrine  of maximum force relentlessly  applied to problems like crop  insects, and weeds, with,  as you know, dire consequences.  "Making it Home."  (reading)  He had crossed the wide ocean  and many a river.  Now not another river lay  between him and home, but only a  few creeks that he knew by name. 

 Arthur Roundberry had come a  long way, trusting somebody else  to know where he was.  And now he knew where he was  himself.  The great river, still raised  somewhat from the flood of that  spring, and flowing swiftly, lay  off across the fields to his  left.  To his right and farther away  were the wooded slopes of the  Kentucky side of the valley,  that's the Ohio Valley.  And over it all, from the tops  of the hills on one side to the  tops of the hills on the other,  stretched the gray sky.  He was walking along the paved  road that followed the river  upstream to the county seat of  Hargrave.  On the higher ground to the  right of the road stood fine  brick farmhouses that had been  built 100 and more years ago,  from the earnings of the rich  bottomland fields that lay  around them.  There had been a time when those  houses had seemed as permanent  to him as the land they stood  on, but where he had been, they  had the answer to such houses.  We wouldn't let one of them  stand long in our way, he  thought.  Art Roundberry walked like the  first man to discover upright  posture, as if having been a  creature no taller than a sheep  or a pig, he had suddenly risen  to the height of six feet and  looked around. 

 He walked, too, like a man who  had been taught to march and he  wore a uniform.  But whatever was military in his  walk was an overlay, like the  uniform, for he had been a man  long before he had been a  soldier, and farmer long before  he had been a man.  An observer might have sensed in  his walk and in the way he  carried himself a reconciliation  to the forms and distances of  the land, such as comes only to  those who have, from childhood,  been accustomed to the land's  work.  The noises of the town were a  long way behind him.  It was too early for the evening  chores and the farmsteads that  he passed were quiet.  Birds sang.  From time to time he heard a  farmer call out to his team.  Once he had heard a tractor off  somewhere in the fields and once  a towboat out on the river, but  those sounds had faded away.  No car had passed him, though he  walked a paved road.  There was no sound near him but  the sound of his own footsteps  falling steadily on the  pavement. 

 Once it had seemed to him that  he walked only on the place  where he was, but now having  gone and returned from so far,  he knew that he was walking on  the whole, round world.  He felt the great empty distance  that the world was turning in,  far from the sun and the moon  and the stars.  Here, he thought, is where we do  what we are going to do.  The only chance we got.  And if somebody was to be  looking down from up there, it  would all look a lot littler to  him than it does to us.  He was talking carefully to  himself in his thoughts, forming  the words more deliberately than  if he were saying them aloud,  because he did not want to count  his steps.  He had a long way still to go  and he did not want to know how  many steps it was going to take,  nor did he want to hear in his  head the counted cadence of  marching.  I ain't marching, he thought.  I am going somewheres.  I am going up the river towards  Hargrave, and this side of  Hargrave before the bridge at  Elville, I will turn up the  Kentucky River and go ten miles  and turn up Sandripple below  Port William, and I will be at  home. 

 He carried a duffel bag that  contained his overcoat, a change  of clothes, and a shaving kit.  From time to time he shifted the  bag from one shoulder to the  other.  I reckon I am done marching,  have marched my last step, and  now I am walking.  There is nobody in front of me,  and nobody behind.  I have come here without  a "by your leave" to anybody.  Them that have known where I was  or was supposed to, for three  years, don't know where I am  now.  Nobody that I know  knows where I am now.  He came from killing.  He had felt the ground shaken  by men and what they did.  Where he was coming from, they  thought about killing day after  day and feared it and did it. 

 And out of the unending,  unrelenting great noise and  tumult of the killing, went  little deaths that belonged to  people one by one.  Some had feared it and had died.  Some had died without fearing  it, lacking the time.  They had fallen around him until  he was amazed that he stood.  Men who, in a little while, had  become his buddies, most of them  younger than he, just boys.  The fighting had been like work,  only a lot of people got killed  and a lot of things  got destroyed.  It was not work that made much  of anything.  You and your people intended to  go your way if you could.  And you wanted to stop the other  people from going their way, if  you could.  And whatever interfered, you  destroyed. 

 You had a thing on your mind  that you wanted, or wanted to  get to.  And anything at all that stood  in your way, you had the right  to destroy.  If what was in the way were  women and little children, you  would not even know it, and it  was all the same.  When your power is in a big gun,  you don't have any small  intentions.  Whatever you want to hit, you  want to make dust out of it.  Farm buildings, houses, whole  towns.  Things that people had made well  and cared for a long time, you  made nothing of.  We blew them apart and scattered  the pieces so they couldn't be  put together again.  And people too.  We blew them apart and scattered  the pieces. 

 He had seen tatters of human  flesh hanging in the limbs of  trees, along with pieces of  machines.  He had seen bodies without  heads, arms and legs without  bodies, strewn around  indifferently as chips.  He had seen the bodies of men  hanging upside down from a tank  turret, lifeless as dolls.  Once when they were firing their  gun, the man beside him,  Eckstrom, began to dance, and  Art thought, this ain't no time  to be dancing.  But old Eckstrom was dancing  because he was shot in the head,  was killed, his body trying on  its own to keep standing.  And others had gone down, near  enough to Art almost that he  could have touched them as they  fell.  Jones, Bitmer, Hirsch,  Walters, Corelli.  He had seen attackers coming  home, climbing over the bodies  of those who had fallen ahead of  them.  A man who in one moment had been  a helper, a friend, in the next  was only a low mound of  something in the way, and you  stepped over him or stepped on  him and came ahead.  Once while they were manning  their gun and under fire  themselves, old Eckstrom got  mad, and he said, "I wish I had  those sons of bitches lined up  to where I could shoot  every damn one of 'em."  And Art said, "Them fellers  over there are doing about the  same work we are,  it appears like to me."  There were nights when the sky  and all the earth appeared to be  on fire, and yet the ground was  covered with snow and it was  cold. 

 At Christmas he was among those  trapped at Bastogne.  He had expected to die, but he  was spared as before, though the  ground shook and the town burned  under a sky bright as day.  They held their own when others  fighting on the outside broke  through.  We was mighty glad to see that  day when it come, he thought.  That was a good day.  The fighting went on, the great  tearing apart, people and  everything else were torn into  pieces.  Everything was only pieces put  together that were ready to fly  apart, and nothing was whole.  You got to where you could not  look at a man without knowing  how little it would take to kill  him, for a man was nothing but  just a little morsel of soft  flesh and brittle bone inside of  some clothes.  And you could not look at a  house or a schoolhouse or a  church without knowing how,  rightly hit, it would just shake  down into a pile of stones and  ashes.  There was nothing you could look  at that was whole, man or beast  or house or tree, that had the  right to stay whole very long. 

 There was nothing above the  ground that was whole but you  had the measure of it and could  separate its pieces and bring it  down.  You moved always in a landscape  of death, wreckage, cinders, and  snow.  And then having escaped so far,  he was sitting by his gun one  afternoon, eating a piece of  chocolate, and talking to an old  red-headed, freckle-faced boy  named McBride, and a shell hit  right where they were.  McBride just disappeared, and a  fragment came to Art as if it  were his own, and had known him  from the beginning of the world,  and had burrowed into him.  From a man in the light on the  outside of the world,  he was transformed  in the twinkling of an eye  into a man in the dark  on the inside of himself,  in pain.  And he thought that he was dead.  How long he was in that darkness  he did not know.  When he came out of it he was in  a place that was white and  clean, the hospital.  And he was in a long room  with many beds.  There was sunlight  coming in the window. 

 A nurse who came by  seemed glad to see him.  "Well, hello, bright eyes,"  she said.  He said, "Why, howdy."  She said, "I think the war  is over for you, soldier."  "Yes, ma'am," he said,  "I reckon it is."  She patted his shoulder.  "You almost got away from us,  you know it?"  And he said, "Yes, ma'am,  I expect I did."  The uniform he wore as he  walked along the road between  Jefferson and Hargrave was now  too big for him.  His shirt collar was loose on  his neck in spite of the neatly  tied tie.  And under his tightened belt,  the waistband of his pants  gathered in pleats.  He stayed in hospitals while his  life grew back around the wound,  as a lightning-struck tree will  sometimes heal over the scar.  Until finally they gave him his  papers and let him go.  And now though he walked  strongly enough along the road,  he was still newborn from his  death, and inside himself he was  tender and a little afraid.  The bus had brought him as far  as the town of Jefferson on the  north side of the river, letting  him out in the middle of the  afternoon in front of the hotel  that served also as a bus  station. 

 From there he could have taken  another bus to Hargrave, had he  been willing to wait until the  next morning.  But now that he was in familiar  country, he did not have it in  him to wait.  He had known many a man who  would have waited, but he was  old for a soldier.  Though he was coming from as far  as progress had reached,  he belonged to an older time.  It did not occur to him, any  more than it would've occurred  to his grandfather, to wait upon  a machine for something he could  furnish for himself.   And so he thanked the kind lady  at the hotel desk, shouldered  his bag, and set out for home on  foot.  The muddy Ohio flowed beneath  the bridge, and a flock of  pigeons wheeled out and back  between the bridge and the  water, causing him to sway as he  walked, so that to steady  himself he had to look at the  hills that rose over the  rooftops beyond the bridge.  He went down the long southward  arc of the bridge,  and for a little while,  he was among houses again.  And then he was outside the  town, walking past farmsteads  and fields, in unobstructed day.  The sky was overcast,  but the clouds were high. 

 It ought to clear off  before morning, he thought.  Maybe it'll be one of them fine  spring days, maybe it'll do to  work, for I have got to get  started.  They would already have begun  plowing, he thought, his father  and his brother Mart.  Though they had begun the year  without him, they would be  expecting him.  He could hear his father's voice  saying, "Any day now, any day."  But he was between lives.  The war had been a life, such as  it was, and now he was out of  it.  The other life, the one he had  once had and would have again,  was still ahead of him.  He was not in it yet.  He was only free.  He had not been out in the  country or alone in a long time. 

 Now that he had the open  countryside around him again,  and was alone, he felt the  expectations of other people  fall away from him like a shed  skin, and he came into himself.  I am not under anybody's orders,  he thought.  What I expect myself to do,  I will do it.  The government don't owe me, and  I don't owe it, except when I  have something again that it  wants, then I reckon I will owe  it.  It pleased him to think that the  government owed him nothing,  that he needed nothing from it,  and he was on his own.  But the government seemed to  think that it owed him praise.  It wanted to speak of what he  and the others had done as  heroic and glorious.  Now that the war was coming to  an end, the government wanted to  speak of their glorious  victories.  The government was made up of  people who thought about  fighting, not those who did it.  The men sitting behind desks,  they spent other men to buy  ground, and then they ruined the  ground they had, and more men to  get the ground beyond. 

 If they were on the right side,  they did it the same as them  that were on the wrong side.  They talk about victory as if  they know all them dead boys was  glad to die.  The dead boys ain't never been  asked how glad they was.  If they had it to do again,  might be they wouldn't do it.  Or might be they would,  but they ain't been asked.  Under the clouds, the country  all around was quiet except for  birds singing in the trees,  wherever there were trees.  And now and then a human voice  calling out to a team.  He was glad to be alive.  He had been glad to be alive  all the time he had been alive.  When he was hit and thought he  was dead, it had come to him how  good it was to be alive, even  under the shelling, even when it  was at its worst. 

 And now he had lived through it  all and was coming home.  He was now a man who had seen  far places and strange things,  and he remembered them all.  He had seen Kansas  and Louisiana, and Arizona.  He had seen the ocean.  He had seen the little farms and  country towns of France and  Belgium and Luxembourg,  pretty, before they were ruined.  For one night, he was in Paris.  That Paris, now, we was there  one day and one night.  There was wine everywheres  and these friendly girls  who said "Kees me."  And I don't know what happened  after about ten o'clock.  I come to the next morning in  this hotel room, sick and broke,  with lipstick  from one end to the other.  I reckon I must've had a right  good time. 

 At first, before he was all the  way in it, there was something  he liked about the war.  A reduction that in a way was  pleasing.  From a man used to doing and  thinking for himself, he became  a man who did what he was told.  That laying around half a day  waiting for somebody else to  think, that was something I had  to learn.  It was fairly restful.  Even basic training tired him  less than what he would  ordinarily have done at that  time of year.  He gained weight.  And from a man with a farm and  crops and stock to worry about,  he became a man who worried only  about himself, and the little  bunch of stuff he needed to  sleep, dress, eat, and fight.  He furnished only himself.  The army furnished what little  else it took to make the  difference between a man and a  beast. 

 More than anything else, he  liked his mess kit.  It was all the dishes a man  really needed, and when you  weren't cooking or eating with  it, you could keep things in it,  a little extra tobacco, maybe.  When I get to Elville, he  thought, I won't be but mighty  little short of halfway.  I know the miles and how they  lay out, end to end.  It had been evening for a while  now.  On the farmsteads that he  passed, people were busy with  the chores.  He could hear people calling  their stock, dogs barking,  children shouting and laughing.  On one farm that he passed, a  woman, a dog, and a small boy  were bringing in the cows.  In the driveway of the barn he  could see a man un-harnessing a  team of mules.  It was as familiar to him as his  own breath, and because he was  outside it still, he yearned  toward it, as a ghost might. 

 As he passed by, the woman,  perhaps because he was a  soldier, raised her hand to him,  and he raised his own in return.  After a while he could see ahead  of him the houses and trees of  Elville, and over the trees the  superstructure of the bridge,  arching into Hargrave.  All during his walk so far, he  had been offering himself the  possibility that he would walk  on home before he would sleep.  But now that he had come nearly  halfway, and Elville was in  sight, he knew he would not go  farther that day.  He was tired.  And with his tiredness had come  a sort of melancholy, and a sort  of aimlessness, as if, all his  ties cut, he might go right on  past his home river and on and  on, anywhere at all in the  world.  The little cluster of buildings  ahead of him now seemed only  accidentally there, and he  himself there,  only accidentally.  He had arrived, as he had  arrived again and again during  the healing of his wound, at the  apprehension of a pure  emptiness, as if at the center  of an explosion, as if, without  changing at all, he and the town  ahead of him, and all the long  way behind him, had been taken  up into a dream in which every  creature and everything sat,  like that boy McBride, in the  dead center of the possibility  of its disappearance.  In the little town, a lane  turned off the highway and went  out beyond the houses and across  the river bottom, for perhaps a  quarter of a mile, to a barn.  And beyond the barn to a small  weather boarded church. 

 It was suppertime then.  The road and the dooryards were  deserted.  Art entered the lane and went  back past the gardens and the  clutter of outbuildings that lay  behind the houses.  At the barn there was a cistern  with a chain pump.  He sat down his bag and pumped  and drank from his cupped left  hand, held under the spout.  Looks like I ought to be hungry,  he thought, but I ain't.  He was not hungry.  And there was no longer anything  much that he wanted to think.  He was tired.  He told himself to lift the bag  again and put it on his  shoulder. 

 He told his feet to walk, and  they carried him on to the  church.  The door was unlocked.  He went in.  He shut the door behind him, not  allowing the latch to click.  The quiet inside the church was  palpable.  He came into it, as into a  different element, neither air  nor water.  He crossed the tiny vestibule  where a bell rope dangled from a  worn hole in the ceiling, went  through another door that stood  open, and sat down on the first  bench to his left, leaving his  duffel bag in the aisle, propped  against the end of a bench.  He let himself become still.  I will eat a little, he thought,  'gainst I get hungry in the  night.  After a while he took a bar of  candy from the bag and slowly  ate it. 

 The church windows were glazed  with an amber colored glass that  you could not see through.  And though it was still light  outdoors, in the church it was  dusk.  When he finished the candy, he  folded the wrapper soundlessly  and put it in his pocket.  Taking his overcoat from the bag  to use as a blanket, he lay down  on the bench.  Many thoughts fled by him, none  stopping, and then he slept.  He woke several times in the  night, listening, and hearing no  threat out in the darkness  anywhere, slept again.  The last time he woke, roosters  were crowing and he sat up.  He sat still a while in the  dark, allowing the waking quiet  of the place to come over him.  And then he took another bar of  candy from his bag and ate it,  and folded the paper and put it  in his pocket as before.  The night chill had seeped into  the church. 

 Standing, he put on the  overcoat.  He picked up his bag and felt  his way to the door.  It had cleared, and the sky was  full of stars.  To the east, upriver, he could  see a faint brightening ahead of  the coming day.  All around him the dark treetops  were throbbing with birdsong,  and from the banks of the two  rivers at their joining, from  everywhere, there was water.  The voices of spring peepers  rose as if in clouds.  Art stood still and looked  around him and listened.  It was going to be the fine  spring day that he had imagined  it might be.  He thought, if a fellow was to  be dead now, and young, might be  he would be missing this a long  time.  There was a privy in back of the  church and he went to it. 

 And then, on his way out of the  lane, he stopped at the barn and  drank again at the cistern.  Back among the houses, still  dark and silent among their  trees, he took the road that led  up into the smaller of the two  river valleys.  There was no light yet from the  dawn, but by the little light of  the stars he could see well  enough.  All he needed now was the  general shape of the place,  given by various shadows and  loomings.  I have hoofed it home from here  many a night, he thought.  Might be I could do it if I was  blind.  But I can see.  He could see, and he walked  along feeling the joy of a man  who sees.  A joy that a man tends to forget  in sufficient light.  The quiet around him seemed wide  as the whole country and deep as  the sky, and the morning songs  of the creatures and his own  footsteps occurred distinctly  and separately in it, making a  kind of geography and a kind of  story. 

 As he walked, the light slowly  strengthened.  As he more and more saw where he  was, it seemed to him more and  more that he was walking his  memory, or that he had entered  awake a dream that he had been  dreaming for a long time.  He was hungry.  The candy bar that he had eaten  when he woke had hardly  interrupted his hunger.  My belly thinks my throat has  been cut.  It is laying right flat against  my backbone.  It was a joy to him to be so  hungry.  Hunger had not bothered him much  for many weeks, had not  mattered.  But now it was as vivid to him  as a landmark.  It was a tree that puts its  roots into the ground and spread  its branches out against the  sky. 

 The east brightened.  The sun lit the edges of a few  clouds on the horizon, and then  rose above them.  He was walking full in its  light.  It had not shone on him long  before he had to take off the  overcoat and he folded it and  rolled it neatly and stuffed it  into his bag.  By then he had come a long way  up the road.  Now that it was light, he could  see the marks of the flood that  had recently covered the valley  floor.  He could see drift logs and mats  of cornstalks that the river had  left on the low fields.  In places where the river ran  near the road, he could see the  small clumps of leaves and  grasses that the currents had  affixed to the tree limbs.  Out in one of the bottoms he saw  two men with a team and wagon,  clearing the scattered debris  from their fields.  They had set fire to a large  heap of drift logs, from which  the pale smoke rose straight up. 

 Above the level of the flood the  sun shone on the small,  still-opening leaves of the  water maples, and on the short  new grass of the hillside  pastures.  As he went along, Art began to  be troubled in his mind.  How would he present himself to  the ones at home?  He had not shaved since before  his long ride on the bus.  He had not bathed.  He did not want to come in after  his three-year absence like a  man coming in from work,  unshaven, and with his clothes  mussed and soiled.  He must appear to them as what  he had been since they saw him  last, a soldier.  And then he would be at the end  of his soldiering.  He did not yet know what he  would be when he ceased to be a  soldier, but when he had thought  so far, his confusion left him.  He came to the mouth of a small  tributary valley.  Where the stream of that valley  passed under the road, he went  down the embankment, making his  way first through trees, and  then through a patch of dead  horseweed stalks to the creek. 

 A little way upstream he came to  a place of large, flat rocks  that had been swept clean by the  creek, and were now in the sun  and dry.  Opening the duffel bag he  carefully laid its contents out  on the rocks.  He took out his razor and brush  and soap and a small mirror, and  knelt beside the stream and  soaked his face and shaved.  The water was cold, but he had  shaved with cold water before.  When he had shaved, he took off  his clothes and, standing in  flowing water that instantly  made his feet ache, he bathed,  quaking, breathing between his  teeth as he raised the cold  water again and again in his  cupped hands.  Standing on the rocks in the    sun, he dried himself with the  shirt he had been wearing.  He put on his clean, too-large  clothes, tied his tie,  and combed his hair.  And then warmth came to him.  It came from inside himself...  and from the sun outside. 

 He felt suddenly radiant in  every vein and fiber of his  body.  He was clean and warm  and rested and hungry.  He was well.  He was in his own country now,  and he did not see anything  around him that he did not know.  I have been a stranger, and have  seen strange things, he thought.  And now, I am where it is not  strange, and I am not a  stranger.  He was sitting on the rocks  resting after his bath.  His bag, re-packed, lay on the  rock beside him and he propped  his elbow on it.  I am not a stranger,  but I am changed.  Now I know a mighty power that  can pass over the earth and make  it strange. 

 There are people where I have  been that won't know their  places when they get back to  them.  Them that lived to get back  won't be where they were when  they left.  He became sleepy, and he lay  down on the rock and slept.  He slept more deeply than he had  in the night.  He dreamed he was where he was,  and a great warm light fell upon  that place and there was light  within it, and within him.  When he returned to the road  after his bath and his sleep, it  was past the middle of the  morning.  His steps fell into their old  rhythm on the blacktop.  I know a mighty power, he  thought, a mighty power of death  and fire.  And anger beyond the power of  any man, made big in machines  equal to many men.  And a little man who has passed  through mighty death and fire  and still lived, what is he  going to think of himself when  he is back again, walking the  river road below Port William,  that we would have blowed all to  flinders as soon as look at it,  if it had got in our way. 

 He walked as before, the left  side of the road, not meaning to  ask for rides.  But as on the afternoon before,  there was little traffic.  He had met two cars going down  toward Hargrave, and had been  passed by only one coming up.  Where the road began to rise  toward Port William up on the  ridge, a lesser road branched  off to the left and ran along  the floor of the valley.  As Art reached this  intersection, he heard a truck  engine backfiring, coming down  the hill.  And then the truck came into  sight and he recognized it.  It was an old, green  International, driven as he  expected, and soon saw, by a man  wearing a trucker's cap and  smoking a pipe.  The truck was loaded with fat  hogs, headed for the packing  plant in Jefferson.  As he went by the old man waved  to Art, and Art waved back.  Sam Hanks, he thought. 

 I have been gone over three  years, and have traveled many a  thousand miles over land and  ocean.  And in all that time, in all  them miles, the first man I have  seen that I have always known is  Sam Hanks.  He tried to think what person he  had seen last when he was  leaving, but he could not  remember.  He took the lesser road, and  after perhaps a mile, turned  into a road still narrower, only  a pair of graveled wheel tracks.  A little later, when the trees  were fully leaved, this would be  almost a burrow, tunneling along  between the creek and the  hillside under the trees.  But now the leaves were small,  and the sun cast the shadows of  the branches in a close network  onto the gravel.  Soon he was walking  below the high water line.  He could see it clearly marked  on the slope to his right,  a line above which the fallen  leaves of the year before were  still bright, and below which  they were darkened by their long  steeping in the flood.  The slope under the trees was  strewn with drift, and here and  there a drift log was lodged in  the branches high above his  head.  In the shadow of the flood, the  spring was late, the buds of the  trees just opening, the white  flowers of twin leaf and  bloodroot just beginning to  bloom. 

 It was almost as if he were  walking underwater, so abrupt  and vivid was the difference  above and below the line that  marked the crest of the flood.  But somewhere, high in the  sunlit branches, a red bird sang  over and over, in a clear,  pealing voice,  "Even so, even so."  And there was nothing around  him that Art did not know.  He knew the place in all the  successions of the year, from  the little blooms that came in  the earliest spring to the  fallen red leaves of October.  From the songs of the nesting  birds to the anxious wintering  of the little things that left  their tracks in snow.  From the first furrow to the  last load of the harvest.  Where the creek turned away from  the road, the valley suddenly  widened and opened.  The road still held up on the  hillside, among the trees,  permitting him to see, through  the intervening branches, the  broad field that lay across the  bottom.  He could see the plowing had  been started.  A long strip had been  back-furrowed out across the  field, from the foot of the  slope below the road to the  trees that lined the creek bank.  And then he saw, going away from  him, almost out to the end of  the strip, two mule teams with  two plowmen walking in the  opening furrows. 

 The plowmen's heads were bent to  their work, their hands riding  easy on the handles of the  plows.  Some distance behind the second  plowman was a little boy,  also walking in the furrow,  and carrying a tin can.  From time to time, he bent  and picked up something  from the freshly turned earth  and dropped it into the can.  Walking behind the boy was a  large hound.  The first plowman was Art's  father, the second his brother,  Mart.  The boy was Art's sister's son,  Roy Lee, who had been two years  old when Art left, and was now  five.  The hound was probably old  Bawler, who made it a part of  his business to be always at  work.  Roy Lee was collecting fishing  worms, and Art looked at the  creek and saw, in an open place  at the top of the bank, as he  expected, three willow poles  stuck into the ground, their  lines in the water.  The first of the teams reached  the end of the plow lane, and  Art heard his father's voice,  clear and quiet.  "Gee, boys."  And then Mart's team finished  their furrow, and Mart said,  "Gee, Sally."  They went across the headland  and started back. 

 Art stood as if looking out of  his absence at them who did not  know he was there, and he had to  shake his head.  He had to shake his head twice  to persuade himself that he did  not hear, from somewhere, off in  the distance, the heavy  footsteps of artillery rounds  striding toward them.  He pressed down the barbed wire  at the side of the road,  straddled over it, and went down  through the trees, stopping at  the foot of the slope.  They came toward him, along the  edge of the plow land, cutting  it two furrows wider.  Soon he could hear the soft  footfalls of the mules, the  tracings jingling, the creaking  of the double trees.  Present to himself, still absent  to them, he watched them come.  At the end of the furrow,  his father called, "Gee!"  and leaned his plow over so  that it could ride around the  headland on the share and right  handle.  And then he saw Art.  "Well, now," he said,  as if only to himself.  "Whoa," he said to the mules,  and again, "Well, now."  He came over to Art  and put out his hand. 

 And Art gave him his.  Art saw that there were tears in  his father's eyes, and he  grinned and said, "Howdy."  Early Roundberry stepped back  and looked at his son and said  again, "Well, now."  Mart came around onto the  headland then and stopped his  team.  He and Art shook hands, grinning  at each other.  "You reckon your foot will still  fit in a furrow?"  Art nodded.  "I reckon it still will."  "Well, here's somebody you  don't hardly know," Mart said,  gesturing toward Roy Lee.  "And who don't know you at all,  I bet.  Do you know who this fella is,  Roy Lee?"  Roy Lee probably did not know,  though he knew he had an uncle  who was a soldier.  He knew about soldiers.  He knew they fought in a war  far away, and here was a great,  tall, fine soldier in a  soldier's suit, with shining  buttons, and the shoes on his  feet were shining.  Roy Lee felt something akin to  awe, and something akin to love,  and something akin to fear. 

 He shook his head, and looked  down at his bare right foot.  Mart laughed.  "This here's your uncle Art,  you know 'bout Uncle Art."  To Art he said, "He's talked  enough about you, he's been  looking out the road to see if  you was coming."  Art looked up the creek and  across it at the house, and the  outbuildings and barn.  He looked around it and the  blinding blue sky over it.  He looked again and again at his  father and his young nephew and  his brother.  They stood up in their lives  around him now in such a way  that he could not imagine their  deaths.  Early Roundberry looked at his  son, now and then reaching out  to grasp his shoulder or his  arm, as if to feel through the  cloth of the uniform the flesh  and bone of the man inside.  "Well, now," he said again and  again, "Well, now."  Art reached down and picked up  a handful of earth  from the furrow nearest him.  "You're plowing it just  a little red, ain't you?"  "Well, we've had a wet time,"  Mart said.  "We felt like we had to go  ahead. 

 Maybe we'll get  another hard frost.  We could yet."  Art said, "Well,  I reckon we might."  And then he heard his father's  voice riding up in his throat as  he had never heard it, and he  saw that his father had turned  to the boy and was speaking to  him.  "Honey, run yonder to the house.  Tell your granny to set on  another plate, for we have  our own, that was gone,  and has come again."  (applause)  >> Meine: Thank you, Wendell.  I'm having a heck of a time up  here, because I was wrapped up  in the story, and I've been  trying to think of an initial  question that I can ask after  it, while you finish your  questions and pass them to the  volunteers.  Please, this is the moment to do  that.  >> Berry: I'm the designated man  to answer all these questions,  but I'm filled with dread.  (laughter)  >> Meine: It's only 2,000,  it's okay.  And my difficulty is,  Wendell is a man of many voices.  You've heard many of them  already in his reading, and  there are many voices also in  the type of writing he does, as  you all well know. 

 Some of you know him best  through his essays, some through  his poetry, some through his  fiction.  And I'm trying very hard to  wonder whether I should follow  up with fiction or go completely  in the other direction to  satisfy that half of the  audience that may have come here  for that.  >> Berry: Let's try to please  everybody, I mean,  it's always easy.  (laughter)  >> Meine: Thank you, that helps.  So I am going to just change the  genre right away, to take  advantage of the fact that  Wendell is with us.  And he, of course, comes in the  aftermath of Michael Pollan's  appearance in Madison recently,  and I'm sure many of you had an  opportunity to hear Mr. Pollan.  And I know that Wendell has had  opportunity as well, to be  either following or coming in  front of Mr. Pollan in different  places.  So I'm actually going to ask a  pre-submitted question.  A friend of mine, who is a great  devotee of Mr. Berry's writing,  sent me eight questions.  (laughter)  >> Berry: Well,  let's start with them. 

 (laughter)  >> Meine: So I am just going  to ask one of them as, again,  your questions  are collected and sorted  and the cream rises to the top.  My friend wonders, Wendell,  about your reaction to this new  wave of interest in the work  that you have been doing for so  long.  Your reaction to the growth of  community-supported agriculture,  organic and local food, the slow  food movement, the nascent slow  money movement.  After so many years of calling  for this kind of change, through  all your many voices, what is  your response to where we are at  the moment with all of this  energy now flowing into these  ideas?  >> Berry: Well, of course,  I'm immensely grateful.  Not too many years ago, I didn't  imagine that I would ever see  this happen.  In fact, there was a year not  too long ago, ten, fifteen  years, when I was saying to  myself, "Well, there's not going  to be any good result.  You're just going to have to go  on with the support of your few  friends you know, and finish it  out this way."  And then, in a year or two,  I realized that things were  going on all over the country.  So, a rare thing for me, I  decided I'd go around on a  speaking trip and kind of  encourage people, and thank them  a little bit.  This bunch of new people, mostly  new people, not all of them, who  are serving the farmer's  markets.  Maybe I'd better take that back,  I don't know whether they're all  new people or not, some of them  are. 

 The farmer's markets, the  community-supported agriculture  farms, and most significantly, I  think, this growth of kind of an  agrarian awareness in the  cities.  Of some kind of duty to those  proxies they've given to other  people to raise food for them.  And so I'm just immensely  grateful to have lasted long  enough to see this.  But at the same time that we  feel a kind of relief and  excitement about this, I think  we ought to check ourselves and  realize what immense jobs of  work we have lying ahead of us,  and how very hard we're going to  have to work to keep our minds  clear and our bodies capable to  carry this on to some kind of  significant conclusion.  The other side is just beginning  to notice us, and we've been a  little dog yapping at the heels  of a giant with a big club.  (laughter)  And we still are.  I had the idea, I'm going to say  it, with some suspicion that it  might not be true, but I think  that national animal  identification business was  maybe the first effort of big  agriculture, of agribusiness, to  use their friends in government  to strike a meaningful blow  against the small producers.  I think there's going to be more  than that as the farmer's  markets and the CSAs begin to  take market share, we're going  to hear from those people.  And they're not going to be the  benign family folk that they've  represented themselves to be.  After all, I come from Kentucky. 

 And I know what the corporations  are capable of.  And if you'd like to know, have  a look at the mountaintop  removal sites in Kentucky and  West Virginia.  These are people who will do  anything, and we mustn't be  optimistic about their  character.  (applause)  Well, the other thing  is that they're working  against themselves.  That's on our side.  To that extent, to the extent  that their failure is obvious to  everybody, and undeniable by  them, they're working for us.  (laughter and applause)  Well, now we're both  going to be surprised.  >> Meine: Well, here's one,  this is a good one because I  was wanting to ask this myself.  (laughter)  And now I don't have to lie.  I could make up questions here. 

 (laughter)  >> Berry: What power,  don't let it go to your head.  (laughter)  >> Meine: As many of you  in the audience know,  another of the connections that  Wendell Berry has to Madison,  Wisconsin comes through his  teacher, Wallace Stegner.  And I know that we have a lot of  Stegner fans in this audience  because I have worked a bit  myself on Stegner.  So the question is simply, could  you tell us what influence  Wallace Stegner has had on your  work?  >> Berry: Well, to answer that  question I have to be more  autobiographical than I really  want to be.  (laughter)  But in 1958, I went to Stanford  on what is known  as a Stegner Fellowship.  $2500 in those days.  And at the time, I had no idea  what my life was, in a curious  way, although I had Tanya, and  we had Mary, our first child.  In some sense, I was still  living outside my life, what had  been my life at the start and  what was going to be my life  later, and I hope at the end.  I thought, I was really a very  ambitious young fellow,  I wanted to be a writer.  I wanted to be a writer  just desperately. 

 And I thought that to be a  writer I would probably have to  be kind of a university bum.  (laughter)  Going around,  teaching creative writing  or some such, at universities.  And what delivered me from that,  ironically, was an invitation  eventually to come back to  Kentucky and teach creative  writing at the University of  Kentucky.  (laughter)  Well, anyway, when I  went to Stanford in 1958,  I'd never been West.  I had learned surprisingly  little as a student.  I knew more than I knew I knew  about my place and about animals  and the things I'd learned at  work.  But I had no idea that I would  become anything but what I just  described to you.  And so, Wallace Stegner, at that  time, impressed himself upon me  simply as an extraordinarily  impressive, attractive man.  A man of considerable humanity  and kindness, also reserve.  And he had a way of... 

 what would you say, emitting  a kind of a aura about himself,  and if you got into that and you  weren't working as hard as you  could, you felt embarrassed.  You knew he was working as hard  as he could.  And then, actually not  altogether to his satisfaction,  I did get invited back to  Kentucky.  And the next thing Tanya and I  did was to buy this little old  place, a hillside on the  Kentucky River that I'd known  all my life, and she very kindly  permitted me to return to and  live in.  And we thought, well, this will  be our weekend place, you see  how extraordinarily original I  was.  (laughter)  I was going to teach  in the university  and have a weekend place  in the country.  (laughter)  And so, the old house  was all to pieces.  There was a corner in the  kitchen where the foundation  rolled under it both ways, and  the corner had opened up, and  the people who'd lived there  before us, they just nailed fly  screen over the hole.  (laughter)  So we began this,  we sort of put our hands to the  work, with some dear friends  that we knew in Port Royal, to  this house, to make it better,  to save it.  And in the course of that, I  don't know which one of us  understood it first. 

 I might as well say Tanya  understood it first because she  always understands everything  first.  (laughter)  It suddenly came upon  us, and I can't remember where  we were standing when this boat  hit us, that we're not fixing up  a weekend place.  We're fixing a place  where we're going to live.  And that I would settle for  that, in Kentucky, really,  I think was a surprise to  Mr. Stegner.  And at the same time, I began to  be really influenced by  Mr. Stegner, because about that  time, "Wolf Willow" was  published.  And that book, that is a  wonderful book, and it has a  perfectly crystalline novella at  the end of it.  But that was about Wallace  Stegner's pilgrimage to the  place of his birth, which was,  of course, a frontier place and  a Western place.  And with that book, I began to  understand him as a writer and,  as far as I still know, the  first writer who had looked upon  his place, his region, not just  as material, but as a  responsibility that he would  have to work for and protect.  And so, as I understood and  lived into that influence from  him, it grew into an immensity  and will always be with me.  (applause)  >> Meine: We'll weave  these threads. 

 I'm going to follow up with  another bit of autobiographical  stuff if you don't mind.  Stegner went west himself,  around the end of World War II.  So this very simple question,  maybe it has a simple answer,  is, where were you in 1944 or  '45 at the time your story was  set?  >> Berry: I was at home.  I was in Henry County, where, in  an odd way, and I think this  would be true of any place,  probably, in the country at that  time.  The war had just been  inescapable.  I had an uncle who was in the  Navy.  He was the only member of my  family who was in the war.  But he was in it  with the craziest luck.  He had gone to the ag school at  the University of Kentucky for a  few semesters, and that was on  his record.  And so they needed a big garden  at Pearl Harbor to feed the  hospital. 

 And my uncle was put in charge  of that garden, and he had a lot  to learn, it was funny to hear  him talk about it.  But he learned a lot from an old  Chinaman named Pan-chu Young,  and his stories about all of  that were great.  But that's where he was stuck.  But also, he was stuck in  another way, because he had to  do hospital duty, even though he  was distracted by that garden  and his chief effort to learn  things.  So it was an extraordinarily  difficult thing to straddle from  the garden to the hospital all  through that war.  So anyway, we young people were  always conscious of the war  because of our neighbors and  kinfolk who were in it.  Because of tragedies coming back  from it to rest at home.  And so it was never very far  from my mind.  And of course, we played war  games, we boys, at school.  We had a game in my room, we  boys played a game called  "Japs and Americans."  And I can't remember that it  had rules or anything, but  anyway, it was a way we acted  out our participation in this  terrible, terrible time. 

 I don't think anybody ever won  that particular war.  But there was a big, sort of,  not a bulletin board, a kind of  great sign in the courthouse  yard, with all the names of all  the people in Henry County, it  was a small county, all the  names of the people who were in  the service on that board.  And we would stand and look at  it and find our relatives'  names, and then when one of them  got killed, there'd be a gold  star that would go up on that  name.  And there were service flags in  the windows.  If you had one boy, or two boys,  there would be a star for each  boy, each son in the window.  And when one of them got killed,  one of those stars would turn to  gold.  So it was, we were very  fortunate not to be fought back  and forth over the top, but we  were also unable ever to forget.  And I might mention one other  thing.  We were very proud, all us boys  who talked endlessly about the  war, we were very proud of our  country in those days, because  we didn't torture prisoners.  (applause)  >> Meine: I encourage you to  read the first essay in  "Citizenship Papers" again,  if you haven't. 

 I reread it again the other  night, and Wendell speaks to  that issue at greater length.  One of the things that strikes  me, listening to your story  tonight, Wendell, just is how  the pacing of it and the  language, and especially your  reading of it, embodies exactly  what the story is about.  The time, the place, the pace.  And of course, we live in a  different age and different time  now, and the pace has changed,  and the homecoming that veterans  experience now is nothing like  what it was in your time.  And I say that as an  introduction to this question,  and to make it a little less of  an abrupt shift, from your time  in your story to the question,  which is, "As an essayist and  cultural critic who has written  a fair amount about community,"  and we heard that, of course, in  the story, "what is your view of  newly-emerging digital  communities?  The internet based communities,  etc.  Are they credible forms of  community?  If not, why not?"  >> Berry: Well, we're just  flooded with language now, which  means that we've got to be  careful about language.  Now, you can speak in a digital  community if you want to, but  all I ask is that you recognize  that you're using a metaphor.  A real community, Aldo Leopold  defined a community, it's the  people and the place and  everything else that's in it.  (applause)  And they're there together,  and they're interdependent,  and we're just trying  in the most awkward way,  like a bunch of children, trying  to understand the extent of our  responsibility toward those  other neighbors that are not  people we like, or that are not  humans.  And this is a terribly daunting  job of work. 

 The work is redeemed by the  great interest there is in it.  I mean, the great interest that  is possibly in it for people who  will apply themselves to it.  How best to farm, or garden, so  as to share the place, rather  than tyrannize over it and  ultimately destroy it.  These are interesting questions,  and people, good people, have  spent their lives on those  questions.  And if they weren't fascinating  questions, they couldn't have  done it.  Just remember that.  >> Meine: Those of you aware of  the time know that we're going a  little bit over, I hope that's  okay with everybody.  It means you might not be able  to get as many books signed  afterward, but it's such an  opportunity.  >> Berry: We just don't want  them to stay till we have to  feed them.  (laughter)  (sound crackles)  >> Berry: That's not us. 

 >> Meine: I hope not.  Especially when it's slow food,  right?  Okay.  Let me just do...  Am I on, can you hear me?  (sound crackles)  (laughter)  I will speak loudly.  (shouts)  Wendell, what are you  writing right now?  (laughter)  >> Berry: Well, I could say  that when I'm able,  I'm writing short stories  because they end  quicker than novels.  (laughter)  And now and then a poem  for the joy of it.  But I also have a schedule of  dutiful work, and much of that  is of real interest.  Jobs that I have to do  just because  I have causes and allies.  My big mistake  was getting a lot of allies  and making friends with people.  (laughter)  Don't do it, young people. 

 (laughter)  >> Meine: Headline,  "Wendell's Advice  to Young People."  >> Berry: Don't make  any friends.  (laughter)  Don't fall in love.  (laughter)  That is actually  pretty good advice,  but you won't take it.  (laughter)  >> Meine: We have, I guess,  one more question and then  one that's almost a question.  So when you said you don't like  to speak the last word, but if  you had to, what would it be?  >> Berry: I don't trade in that  commodity of last words or what  would be the thing I would tell  President Obama if I could tell  him something.  I don't think it's reducible to  anything short enough to tell  the president.  I don't think that I know  anything that's reducible to a  last word.  People like to trade in that  kind of stuff, but it's stuff,  it really doesn't amount to very  much.  What really interests me is the  possibility that we humans can  make sense.  And this is an issue, a formal  issue, of the greatest urgency  and gravity. 

 What are the conditions in which  we human beings can make sense?  Within what limits are our minds  effective?  Now, I've been griping about  this to some of my friends  lately.  We've had two generations of  college-bred people now, who  have really been indoctrinated  with the idea that every big  problem has a big solution.  And I just don't believe it.  (applause)  The big problems we have now are  going to be solved, if they ever  are solved, by hundreds of  people accepting local  responsibilities for small  problems.  They're never going to get  famous, they're never going to  get tenure for this.  (laughter)  But this is the way  it has to work.  We're not really very smart,  we humans.  And the idea that somebody could  come up with a big solution to a  big problem is always dangerous.  It always comes up with the  simple, the simple solution.  People who make simple solutions  always make trouble. 

 And they're always surprised by  the trouble they make.  (laughter)  So, to hell  with the last words.  Let's try to make one sentence  that's rightly positioned within  a manageable context, so that we  can utter it to somebody else  and they'll understand it.  And that we'd be then on the way  to defining a job of work that  we could actually do.  I think -  (applause)  >> Meine: So this last one  is not a question,  it's a statement,  and it looks like a good one  to bring this to a close on.  Then I have something  to give to Wendell.  I'll just read it.  "Wendell, thank you for your  companionship and direction -  for THE companionship and  direction you have provided for  me since I read  "The Unsettling of America"  when it first came out.  There may be no true blood  between us, but we are kin.  >> Berry: All right. 

 (applause)  Then how would you settle  for two last words?  (laughter)  You're welcome.  (applause)  >> Meine: Before we say a thank  you back to Wendell, I have a  couple of last parting gifts for  our guests from Kentucky.  First of all, I do want to thank  Tanya for joining Wendell  tonight, it's so great to have  you with us as well.  (applause)  I've had the opportunity  to do this  a couple years running now,  at the Book Festival.  It's been my privilege and I've  had a lot of fun doing it,  because I've gotten introduced  friends.  So, two years ago some of you  may have been in the audience  when Terry Tempest Williams was  here.  And I had to give her something  special because she had  discovered in her last trip  before that to Wisconsin the  glory and wonder of cheese  curds.  (laughter)  And I'm deeply concerned  that because Wendell  knows Terry Tempest Williams  that they will have a  conversation and she will say,  "Did Curt  give you cheese curds?"  So the bad news is, it's not  cheese curds, but it is,  these are both, by the way,  homegrown gifts  from Sauk County, Wisconsin.  So this is Carr Valley  apple-smoked cheddar.  >> Berry: All right,  well, thank you. 

 (applause)  Smoked all right.  Thank you very much.  >> Meine: I figured having  Wendell Berry here and not  giving him some local food,  I might get arrested.  And this is also a homegrown  product of Sauk County.  I'll make the story very short.  Two years ago when we finished  work at the Aldo Leopold Legacy  Center outside of Baraboo, we  ended up having a few of the  timber, a few pieces of the  timber and slash left over from  the trees, harvested onsite,  many of them planted by  Nina Bradley, right there,  75 years ago.  We had just enough wood left  over to mill that wood into  paper.  So here for Wendell,  to commemorate his visit  is this special edition of  the "Sand County Almanac"  published on paper grown  by its author and his family.  Thank you, Wendell Berry.  (applause)  Thank you, Wendell. 

 >> Berry: All right,  that's very moving.  That's a very moving gift.  (applause)