Wendell Berry, now in his 92nd year, has just released a new novel, *Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story*. Counting the books listed before the title page, it stands as the 15th installment in a series of novels and short stories centered on the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky.
While the narrative is fictional, the entire series reflects Berry’s own life—best understood as membership in a community that simultaneously transcends time and sanctifies its space. Within this community, Berry writes, each member is anticipated in the stories of those who came before and bound to those who will come after as listeners. The fervent and reasonable hope is that these listeners will become participants themselves.
Berry makes the compelling case that all who have told stories since the dawn of humankind recognize that our lives are, in essence, stories—woven together, passed down, and shared. The characters in the Port William series do not bear the exact names of the people Berry knew or heard about, nor do the stories recount precise events from those lives. Yet in telling these tales, the essence of who those people are lives on. This living essence propagates itself through each telling, inviting the reader—propelled by vital and moral force—to find a way to become part of the narrative.
In these stories, the place where they unfold is always present. For Berry, this is key. Acceptance of being situated in the world guides us to measure our lives by how we enrich that place with love—a love that we discover flowing toward us from the place itself, sustaining us as our eyes are opened to see.
Berry clearly identifies the great idolatry of modern humanity: the worship of abstractions. This misplaced worship crowds out acknowledgment of the miraculous world God made and challenges us, from the very beginning of the Bible, to see as God sees: “It is good, it is very good.”
Berry’s portrayal of place and community is one of lives and stories nested within one another, energizing and defining both characters and storytellers, as well as their shared environment. The distinctiveness of the place gives love its definition, focus, and feeling.
At the end of this volume, in his acknowledgments, Berry writes: “This book is based upon a ‘real story,’ which, because it is mostly undocumented, must be told as fiction.” From this vantage point in his tenth decade, this statement applies to the entire series. Without precise documentation, truth must be sought through truthful narrative.
In this storytelling tradition, the irrecoverable minutiae impart meaning to the faithful storyteller, whose success depends on the reader’s assent. This is the most ancient form of empiricism, where the veracity of the life described is tested in the reader’s soul. The Port William stories pass this test, even as the author mourns the passing of the way of life that sustained his characters, their ancestors, and the community.
Berry’s art demonstrates how modern culture has abstracted us from our place on earth, leaving us as wounded in our souls as the land is wounded from neglect. This burden—both of the book and the series—is one Berry shoulders squarely. Like so much of life, it is a story of hope and failure.
By virtue of telling the story—and of reading it—the storyteller (and all listeners and readers, who are meant to become storytellers themselves) stands simultaneously above and within all the times of this multigenerational narrative.
Andy, the character representing Berry himself, reflects:
> “And so Andy has had to see himself, grown old, a man of his own time who might say, ‘What we wanted was to make a life and a way of life, here in this place, that our children and their children could take from us and carry on. And each of us, in his own way in his own time, has failed.’”
At the heart of this truthful record of failure, met with resilience and hope, echoes the great story underpinning our civilization.
The community of Kentucky tobacco growers embodied ideals of independence and self-governance. Because of this independence—not in contradiction to it—they shared work and joined together locally to ensure fair prices for their crop, despite the power of tobacco monopolists.
Their life together was lived in close partnership with the land that yielded their crops, with animals who contributed their bodies to work and sustenance, and with the trees and plants that provided fuel, food, and cash crops.
The triumph of machines shattered this world after World War II. The war claimed many lives, and its deeper effects unfolded afterward. As the world collapsed into opposition and violence, so too did this community slowly fall apart. Its humanity and closeness to the land no longer held market value.
Abstractions of economics and politics—and the insensate power of machines—made this human community its victim. The knowledge needed to build such an independent life must be regained. Just as America will have to relearn shipbuilding skills if it wishes to restart that trade, small farm America must recover all the knowledge once held within its workers.
In Port William, and much of rural America, the old way of life departed and was replaced by little work at all, drug use as a bitter and deadly comfort, and a gutted living core.
The precise art of farming—one that matched the land and the shared meaning of independent work—was lost. What remains after all this subtraction? Have we lost knowledge of independence, real communities, and love of neighbors?
Berry realizes that, aside from the Amish and a few other outliers, this knowledge may now reside only in the book the reader holds.
Yet, this story—so real and so well told—enters the soul and spurs our own storytelling, which remains the core of human community.
There is an old midrash—a discussion between Rabbi Akiva and his student Ben Azzai, from about 1,900 years ago—that offers insight. Rabbi Akiva suggests that the organizing principle of all Scripture is Leviticus’ command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Everything else, personal or communal, is built upon this foundation.
Ben Azzai disagreed, proposing instead Genesis 5:1: “This is the story of the offspring of Adam: In the day that God created Adam, it was in the likeness of God that He created him.”
Ben Azzai argued that even love depends on something more—being part of and resembling the One who is most lovable. Only then can we love ourselves, love each other, and love the world that holds and sustains us as we build community.
This is the story of humankind, told by its Great Author and entrusted to us to retell in our own words, together.
So much of Berry’s story is about loss. As Andy acknowledges (and as found in the Bible), so much that was good is lost. Even more, we are implicated in that loss. Again, Andy’s words:
> “And each of us, in his own way in his own time, has failed.”
Yet, as in Scripture, this is not the end. Though tried by loss, what we stand for—what is true and everlasting—cannot be diminished.
In our humanity, fashioned in God’s likeness, there is that which is good, beautiful, and invincible. It becomes clear only in the telling, for the storyteller’s love lives on in the tale—a love that increases, despite the world’s ephemeral subtraction, as it brings one more life into the story.
Andy’s realization at the end of the book resonates like Scripture finding its voice in the American idiom, retelling America’s tale nested inside its own reading and retelling of Israel’s story—trying, failing, and returning time and again to live within the love that calls it into being.
He begins to awaken into his memory and the memory of his elders. It is as if his soul learns to stand outside his own life in the great opening where time flows, in the company and council of other souls.
In reveries and dreams, he moves among loved ones lost to the world’s sundering—as if again in their presence and as if in some hereafter already here.
Within this great story, we are saved from machines that mimic human likeness yet fall short of the divine—less than realized love.
The promised windfall profit of modern abstractions is always paid in debased currency—pennies on the dollar—before even those pennies disappear.
None of the promises of this world hold if we sell our humanity, splitting ourselves from the divine image that responds and suffers at even the smallest hurt, yet rises again and again to establish love’s community as sovereign in this world.
Here are Andy’s words, evincing this triumph, borne by work infused with redemptive knowledge of the very world God loves:
> “His remembering and thoughts have carried him far outside the matter-of-fact of this world’s present age. He stands with his father and his father’s father, and others dear to him, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land they have desired as if seen from afar—a land that is yet the same, the very land they have known and know—a love-made land, dark to them until, by their own love, they came to see it.”
Andy and Berry do not present this story as a panacea. It is only by learning to love, even in defeat and loss, that our love can triumph—transcending time while redeeming it.
This is not something slogans, algorithms, economic theories, or political philosophies can deliver alone. But such love must inform all these areas.
It is a love stronger than death.
In setting this love first, we can shape our economics, politics, and every small part of our lives to tell this great story.
Above all else, it is this—this first and foremost—that we must conserve, cherish, and pass on.
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*Note: This article is part of a series exploring Wendell Berry’s work and its profound reflection on community, place, and storytelling in modern life.*
https://spectator.org/wendell-berry-shows-us-how-to-love-in-loss/
