St. Wendell

Posted by Ty Fischer on Mar 19, 2009 6:05:39 AM
March 19, 2009
 
 I just finished Wendell Berry’s Andy Catlett: Early Travels. It contains the tales of a young boys travels to his grandparents during summer break in 1943. Everyone is holding their breath waiting for some of the men of the community to return from the Second World War. I loved the book because I remember spending so much time at my own grandmother’s house growing up. I remember the stories that were told and the tasks that I did. I remember receiving ice cream at odd times for little or no reason. So, yes, for me this was a trip into nostalgia. I will not ask forgiveness. The perspective of the book comes from a grown up Andy Catlett. He writes knowing who is going to return from
Europe
and what is going to happen to his small, quiet world. He makes this diagnosis of our economy—fyi

Berry

wrote this book in 2006:

Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the world of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.

The words about our economy ring too true in this time to ignore particularly in light of the fact that the answer that our government seems to be wheeling out is too build fantasy on top of fantasy to keep the economy moving. The deeper we drink in a lie the more repentance will hurt.

 
 Anyway, I have found nothing in

Berry

that I do not like. I should not surprise you that I recommend this as well. It is short. It will bring back good memories. It will raise those troubling questions that

Berry

, for me, best raises.