Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
September 1, 2026
Wendell Berry died Monday, at ninety-two, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on land his family had farmed for generations. Most writers do not get to die inside their own thesis. Berry spent sixty years arguing that a person should belong to a place, stay in it, care for it, and be buried in it, and then he did all four. Whatever else you make of the work, the man passed his own test.
There was a time, when I was younger, when I wanted his life. Not admired — wanted. The acres, the physical work with visible results, the distance from everything that buzzes. Agrarianism is a persuasive dream when you are young and every job in front of you consists of moving abstractions between screens. I read the essays and felt the pull of a life where the things you touched all day were real.
I never bought the farm. I went the other direction — about as far the other direction as it is possible to go; I build software, and lately the kind that writes itself. So Berry's death leaves me holding a question I have been avoiding for a long while: what happens to that old attraction when you audit it honestly? Was it a road not taken, or was there something in it I actually kept?
First, the life, because the life was the argument.
In 1964 Berry was teaching at New York University, a young writer with a Stanford fellowship behind him, standing in the literary capital of the world with the whole ladder in front of him. He left. He went back to Henry County, Kentucky, where his family had farmed for generations, bought a hillside farm at Lanes Landing, and worked it — with horses, for decades — while writing the novels, poems, and essays that made him the patron saint of everyone who has ever wanted to log off.
His colleagues considered it career suicide, and by the logic of careers they were right. That is what makes the move interesting. Berry was not retreating from failure; he was declining success on the terms offered — and the entire body of work that followed is one long explanation of why the terms were bad.
The most famous refusal came in the late 1980s, in a short essay for Harper's explaining why he would not buy a computer. He wrote with a pencil. His wife Tanya typed and edited the pages on a Royal typewriter they had owned since 1956 — a small literary cottage industry, he called it, and he saw no reason to disrupt something that worked. The essay drew more angry letters than the magazine was accustomed to, and it is still assigned, still argued with, still — mostly — misread.
Because the essay was never really about computers. Buried in it is a set of standards Berry proposed for adopting any new tool, and the standards are the real bequest: the new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces. Smaller in scale. Repairable near your home, by someone you could know. And it should not disrupt anything good that already exists — family, community, the body's own competence. Run down the list and notice what it never mentions: farming. The tests are not about agriculture. They are about ownership, scale, legibility, and place. The farm was where Berry applied them. It was never what they were.
I want to deal directly with something uncomfortable, because Berry's death will set off a quiet custody battle over his memory, and one side of it has been gathering for years.
There is a corner of the modern right — the homestead aesthetic, the trad-life accounts, some of the MAGA-adjacent world — that has adopted Berry as a grandfather: the bearded Kentucky farmer who rejected modernity, distrusted global systems, honored tradition and land and faith. I understand the adoption. Half of it is even accurate.
But the man himself does not sort, and the record is not ambiguous. In 1970 — before it was comfortable, in Kentucky, from a farm — Berry published The Hidden Wound, a book arguing that racism was a wound white America had dealt itself, and that no community could be whole while pretending otherwise. In 2011, at seventy-six, he spent four days occupying the Kentucky governor's office with coal-country residents to protest mountaintop removal. In 2013, at Georgetown College, he stood in front of Baptist ministers and defended same-sex marriage, on the grounds that the state had no business sorting people into categories of lesser belonging. He opposed wars most of his admirers on the right supported and agribusiness most of his admirers on the left bought groceries from. Both parties had reasons to claim him and both had reasons to wish he would be quiet.
He was, in other words, another one of the unsorted — the people I keep finding myself writing about, who hold their convictions à la carte and pay full price in both directions. What the aesthetic adoption takes from Berry is the nostalgia. What it drops is everything the nostalgia cost him: the staying put, the limits, the fidelity, and a membership that included every neighbor he had, not just the ones who voted like him. Agrarianism without the obligations is just a filter on a photograph. Berry's whole point was the obligations.
Which brings me back to my audit, and its uncomfortable subject: me.
By every surface measure I failed the attraction completely. I did not buy land. I moved abstractions between screens for decades and now I build automation — I teach machines to do knowledge work, which is roughly the last stop on the train Berry declined to board. If the agrarian dream was a test of where you live and what you hold, I failed it the year I took the bar exam, and every year since.
But run Berry's actual tests — the four standards from the computer essay — against the work, and something strange happens.
The software industry's reigning model is the black box at continental scale: tools you rent and never own, running in places you will never see, doing things you cannot inspect, built and repaired by nobody you could ever meet. It is, precisely, the agribusiness model — get big or get out — applied to thought. And the thing I have ended up building my work around is the opposite claim: that a team should own its automation, be able to read it, run it where their data already lives, at a scale one group of people can understand and repair. I did not get that from Berry, or not knowingly. But it is his test, passed or failed item by item — cheap, small, legible, repairable, close to home, disruptive of nothing that already works.
That is what actually survived the fantasy, and I think it is what was underneath the fantasy the whole time. I did not want a farm. I wanted work I could see all of. The acres were a proxy — the most vivid available image of an operation whose every part one person could walk, inspect, and answer for. Berry would say you cannot fully have that without soil, and he might be right, and this is where he and I part with a handshake: I think the tests travel. I think you can farm well or badly in any medium, and that most of what is wrong with my industry is that it farms badly — strip-mines, actually — and calls the tailings progress.
Taking the good from both was never going to mean a hobby garden and a laptop. It means holding the modern medium to the agrarian standard: whatever you build, know it whole, own it outright, keep it at the scale of responsibility, and do not let it disrupt the good that was there before it.
I wrote on Friday about Genesis 2:15 — the verse where God puts the man in the garden to work it and to keep it, before any fall, before any curse. Work as the original assignment; the thorns came later.
I did not realize until this week that I had been writing about Berry. Sixty years on one hillside is that verse taken literally — the working and, harder, the keeping: the part of the assignment that does not scale, cannot be delegated, and produces nothing you can show a careerist. Berry is what it looks like when a man reads the oldest job description in the book and simply does it, east of the gate, thorns and all, until the age of ninety-two.
I never bought the farm, and I no longer think I was supposed to. But I kept his tests, the way you keep a tool from a grandfather whose trade you did not enter — recognizing that the handle fits your grip anyway.
The farm was his instance. The keeping is the inheritance.