Wendell Berry is a master of all literary genres and was awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, Berry explores the notion of living a principled life in accordance with the natural world. His many volumes of poetry include The Broken Ground, The Country of Marriage, and Collected Poems, 1957–1982. True to his vision, Berry lives with his wife, Tanya, on a farm in Kentucky that has been in his family since the nineteenth century.

Photograph by Guy Mendes

A Matter of Necessity

An Essay

by Wendell Berry

To rescue ourselves, our fellow beings, and our places from the rampage of big ideas that feed upon without recognizing all the things of the world, we need an adequate language—a language not alienated from us by divorce from things and therefore at the service of our exploiters and oppressors. We need at the very least a speakable inventory of the things particularly belonging to our own places and lives that are worth saving.

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