Last semester I did an independent study devoted entirely to reading Wendell Berry’s essays and poetry. Although I didn’t read this essay as part of that study, I did read it in a literature course called Literature and Landscape. I enjoyed having the opportunity to read it again. The more I read things, the more they lodge themselves in my memory.
My respect for Wendell Berry is great, even if he expresses his opinions strongly and sometimes harshly. For example, in this essay about being in the woods he condemns the progressive, machine and technology driven American society. He retreats into the woods as a kind of moral purification. He enters despondent and pessimistic and leaves renewed and hopeful. I think this is a simplification of Berry’s argument, however. In some of his other essays that I read, he claims that machines are good up to a point. If machines enhance human work, they are helpful; if they replace human work, they are detrimental. So when I read, “the distant roar of engines, though it may seem only to be passing through this wilderness, is really bearing down upon it” (676), I interpret his words through my knowledge of his other essays. He doesn’t hate machines. He drives a car to the edge of the woods and then walks in to his campsite. He does, however, approach technology and the fast-paced life with apprehension and caution. He implicates himself in the technological culture but also resists full assimilation. He wants to remember and celebrate the renewal possible through a retreat into the natural world.
Your experience with Berry's work provides useful insight into this essay. I am also struck in your explanation by the similarity between his thinking on machines and what I understand the Amish attitude to be. It provides a useful perspective to the usual extremes -- total repudiation or total endorsement.
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