Wendell Berry and Czeslaw Milosz

I have always loved the work of Wendell Berry – the deep connection to place, to a language, to a community, a way of life. His siren call for Americans to return to simpler life, to more just ways has always struck me as completely appropriate and completely impossible all at the same time. Like a call to see the world upside-down: Interesting, and meaningful, but so completely unlike my experience as to be rendered completely impossible. Yesterday, on the word of Milosz’s death – I picked up a volume of his collected essays. I realized the essential difference between Berry and myself – the notion of exile. Berry has been able to build his life around one place, and his writing and thinking is informed by that experience. Milosz (and I) are informed by the experience of transience – of radical movement – of the impossibility or returning to a place called home. So when you say our work is less “grounded” than Berry’s work – there is good reason. In his essay “Notes on Exile” Milosz writes:

Imagination, always spatial, points north, south, east, and west of come central, privileged place, which is probably a village from one’s childhood or native region. As long as a writer lives in his country, the privileged place, by centrifugally enlarging itself, becomes more or less identified with his country as a whole. Exile displaces that center or rather creates two centers. Imagination relates everything in one’s surrounding to “over there” – in my case, somewhere on the European continent. It even continues to designate the four cardinal points, as if I still stood there. At the same time the north, south, east, and west are determined by the place in which I write these words. Imagination tending toward the distant region of one’s childhood is typical of literature of nostalgia (a distance in space often serves as a disguise for a Proustian distance in time). Although quite common, literature of nostalgia is only one among many modes of coping with estrangement from one’s native land. The new point which orients space in respect to itself cannot be eliminated, i.e., one cannot abstract from one’s physical presence in a definite spot on the Earth. That is why a curious phenomenon appears: the two centers and the two spaces arranged around them interfere with each other or – and this is a happy solution – coalesce.

To be fair, my sense of exile is based on nothing so dramatic as the experience of Milosz – who like so many of his time was caught between the totalitarian pincers of Stalin and Hitler, and survived to tell his story. Nor was I forced to leave all in search of a few dollars because of the grinding poverty of rural Latin America. My parents chose to move to Ecuador and serve there as missionaries. My home was there, its where I’m from. Yet I cannot call myself Ecuadorian any more than I can say I’m from Tennessee -- it just doesn’t work. I know both the phenomenon of understanding two centers, and on the other hand not feeling completely identified by either one. I cannot write like Wendell Berry from either place. Milosz explains well the difficulty I find reading Berry, why I can both see things one way and another, why it is not hard for me to think through the values of contrarian positions. Not having known a single set of cardinal points – I have yet to have that happy experience of coalescence.