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Wendell Berry, in conversation with the author, on his front porch in July, 2012. Photo by Michael A. Lindenberger
WASHINGTON — Wendell Berry turns 80 today, a fine milestone for a wonderful writer and powerful, often unsettling, thinker. Something you probably don’t know, is that he has a curious connection to Dallas, where he was invited to speak several times in the mid-1980s.
He came in 1985, after having received an unusual invitation. By then, Berry had become well known as a farmer-poet, novelist, essayist and author of The Unsettling of America. He was asked to town by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, not just to speak but to take in the growing metropolis and offer his reaction.
Berry took the role seriously. He toured the architecture downtown, the skyscrapers, the imposing I.M. Pei handiwork on Marilla and the busy site of what would soon be the Meyerson, also the work of Pei.
That night Berry told his audience that he had been impressed.
“I don’t see how one could fail to be impressed by the view through the windows of City Hall in Dallas,” Berry said, according to tape recording preserved by the Institute, which was kind of enough to dig through their archives to find for me in the summer of 2012. “There is a monumentality to the view. I looked and looked, and finally I realized that the people look awfully small. They look to be scaled about like the people in the mountain paintings of the Chinese.”
“Then I realized something else. Those buildings are symbols. They stand for some people. They literally stand for some people, who are not little. The message of those buildings is: ‘This way of things will last forever.’”
There is no record of the visit in our archives, but thankfully the Institute kept a box full of forgotten audiotapes from the symposium, including musings by Vincent Scully and other leading thinkers of the day. There were recordings from Berry’s poetry readings (example below), too. And, D Magazine had a write up, available here.
