How Wendell Berry saved my life

I owe Wendell Berry my life. Not literally, of course, but maybe in a deeper and more important sense, the life that I now lead. Considering myself truly blessed with the riches that matter, I credit Wendell — the agrarian writer, philosopher, and poet, who died Monday, aged 92 — with my family’s monumental bounty. It was sometime around 2006 or 2007, while I was teaching at Georgetown University, that I began reading Berry in earnest: his elegies for what his native Kentucky, and America, had lost in the bargain of industrial development; and how to win some of it back. I had encountered his work in passing during graduate school, as far back as the 1980s, but I wasn’t yet the person, or hadn’t yet ripened into the situation, to receive those words in the way they would hold and haunt me