It is arguable, I think, that our country’s culture is still suspended as if at the end of Huckleberry Finn, assuming that its only choices are either a deadly “civilization” of piety and violence or an escape into some “Territory” where we may remain free of adulthood and community of obligation. We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility. We have imagined the great and estimable freedom of boyhood, of which Huck Finn remain s the finest spokesman. We have imagined the bachelorhood of nature and genius and power: the contemplative, the artist, the hunter, the cowboy, the general, the president – lives dedicated and solitary in the Territory of individuality. But boyhood and bachelorhood have remained the norms of “liberation,” for women as well as men. We have hardly begun to imagine the coming to responsibility that is the meaning, and the liberation, of growing up. We have hardly begun to imagine community life, and the tragedy that is at the heart of community life.

Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” from What Are People For?

I’ve always admired Wendell Berry, and his reputation, but mostly from afar. I am trying to amend that early on this summer by digging into his works a bit, starting with What Are People For?, a collection of essays he published in the early 90s. The quote above is pulled from the essay “Writer and Region”, in which Berry grapples with regionalism in American writing through the lens of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. This essay jumped at me not least because of the strange place occupied by that classic American novel in our culture today. It has come under heavy, and I’d say misguided, critique because of its necessarily contextual relationship to race. The book was published, after all, in 1885.

Berry does a good job of identifying why it is such an important book in the history of American literature, namely, its prolonged meditation on boyhood and the freedoms and responsibilities of growing up. The quoted passage really jumped at me because of the application of those themes to America – the America of today as much as the America of 1987 that the author was writing in. Maybe more so today, three-and-a-half decades on. We’ve learned very few lessons from Berry in that time, least of all what freedom and responsibility really mean for a people. We’ve leaned into heavily into the desire for freedom and rights and power, and away from the attendant demands of responsibility. Our economic, cultural, and military power has long been able to paper over this rupture, but it seems those days are coming to an end. The cracks are appearing as we continue to pull our demands for greater and greater autonomy away from any sense that that autonomy demands even more of us than we could imagine.

And this isn’t exclusively an issue of the right or of the left, a point I have been asserting more and more here and elsewhere. All points on our political spectrum have leaned into the idea that any ties that bind or responsibilities that demand or burdens that we may be asked to carry are somehow illegitimate and tyrannical. This is the freedom of small children, all expression and emotion and movement, and devoid of any sense of themselves as existing in relation to anyone or anything else. It’s the freedom of Huck Finn, as he desires to leave Miss Polly and the town and people he knows. It’s a freedom that takes the boyhood adventures of Finn as the only testament of life, rejecting the idea that Huck continued to grow beyond being a boy and into a man. Twain didn’t write that story, and we get to pretend it tells us something about the trajectory of our own lives.

I don’t want to rant too much here on this particular hobby horse of mine, so I’ll wrap this up. I’m looking forward to reading and sharing more of Berry’s works here over the coming weeks, and reflecting on his particular vision of life and his critiques of all of our cultural and societal shibboleths.