I
MY FAMILY AND I had a good friend I will call Lily. Lily was industrious and generous, a good neighbor. She was especially well-loved by her neighbors’ children and grandchildren, though she had no children of her own. She lived a long time, surviving her husband by many years. At last, permanently ill and debilitated, she had to leave the small house that she and her husband had bought in their latter years and go to the nursing home. My brother, who was her lawyer, never until then much needed, arranged for the sale of her house and all her worldly goods.
I went to visit her a day or two after the sale. She was bedfast, sick and in some pain, but perfectly clear in her mind. We talked of the past and of several of our old neighbors, long gone. And then, speaking of the sale of her possessions, she said, “I’m all finished now. Everything is done.”
She said this so cheerfully that I asked her, “Lily, is it a load off your mind?”
She said, “Well, Wendell, it hurt me. I laid here the night when I knew it was allgone, and I could see it all, all the things I’d cared for so long. But, yes, it is a load off my mind.”
I was so moved and impressed by what she said that I wrote it down. She had lived her life and met her hardships bravely and cheerfully, and now she faced her death fully aware and responsible and with what seemed to me a completed grace. I didn’t then and I don’t now see how she could have been more admirable.
The last time I saw Lily she was in the hospital, where the inevitable course of her illness had taken her. By then, in addition to a seriously afflicted heart, she had not recovered from a bout of pneumonia, and because of osteoporosis she had several broken bones. She was as ill probably as a living creature can be and in great pain. She was dying. But in talking with the resident physician, I discovered that he had taken her off her pain medication to increase her appetite in the hope, he said, of “getting her back on her feet.”
And so a life in every sense complete had to suffer at its end this addendum of useless and meaningless pain. I don’t think this episode is unusual or anomalous at the present time. The doctor’s stupidity and cowardice are in fact much mitigated by being perfectly conventional. The medical industry now instructs us all that longevity is a good in itself. Plain facts and simple mercy, moreover, are readily obscured by the supposed altruism of the intent to “heal.”
I am obliged now to say that I am by no means an advocate of euthanasia or “assisted suicide.” My purpose here is only to notice that the ideal of a whole or a complete life, as expressed in Psalm 128 or in Tiresias’ foretelling of the death of Odysseus, now appears to have been replaced by the ideal merely of a long life. And I do not believe that these two ideals can be reconciled.
As a man growing old, I have not been able to free my mind of the story of Lily’s last days or of other stories like it that I know, and I have not been able to think of them without fear. This fear is only somewhat personal. It is also a cultural fear, the fear that something valuable and necessary to our life is being lost.
To clarify my thoughts I have been in need of some further example, and recently the associations of reading led me to Robert Southey’s account of the Battle of Trafalgar in his biography of Lord Nelson. I am by conviction a pacifist, but that does not prevent me from being moved and instructed by the story of a military hero. What impresses me in Southey’s account is the substantial evidence that Nelson went into the battle both expecting and fully prepared to die.
He expected to die because he had refused any suggestion that he should enter the battle in disguise in order to save himself. Instead, he would wear, Southey wrote, “as usual, his Admiral’s frockcoat, bearing on the left breast four stars of the different orders with which he was invested. ”He thus made himself the prime target of the engagement; he would live and fight as himself, though it meant that he would die unmistakably as himself. As for his decorations: “In honor I gained them, and in honor I will die with them.” And before the battle he wrote out a prayer, asking for a British victory but also for humanity afterward toward the enemy. “For myself individually,” he wrote, “I commit my life to Him who made me...”
At the end of his account, published in 1813, eight years after the battle, Southey wrote of the admiral’s death a verdict undoubtedly not so remarkable then as the succeeding two centuries have made it: “There was reason to suppose, from the appearance upon opening the body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have fallen prematurely whose work was done...”
Nelson was killed at the age of forty-seven, which would seem to us in our time to be a life cut “tragically short.” But Southey credited to that life a formal completeness that had little to do with its extent and much to do with its accomplishments and with Nelson’s own sense of its completeness: “Thank God, I have done my duty.”
The issue of the form of a lived life is difficult, for the form as opposed to the measurable extent of a life has as much to do with inward consciousness as with verifiable marks left on the world. But we are already in the thick of the problem when we have noticed that there does seem to be such a thing as a good life; that a good life consists, in part at least, of doing well; and that this possibility is an ancient one, having apparently little to do with the progress of science or how much a person knows. And so we must ask how it is that one does not have to know everything in order to do well.
The answer, apparently, is that one does so by accepting formal constraints. We are excused from the necessity of creating the universe, and most of us will not have even to command a fleet in a great battle. We come to form, we in-form our lives, by accepting the obvious limits imposed by our talents and circumstances, by nature and mortality, and thus by getting the scale right. Form permits us to live and work gracefully within our limits.
In
The Soil and Health, his light-giving book of 1947, Sir Albert Howard wrote:
It needs a more refined perception to recognize throughout this stupendous wealth of varying shapes and forms the principle of stability. Yet this principle dominates. It dominates by means of an ever-recurring cycle, a cycle which, repeating itself silently and ceaselessly, ensures the continuation of living matter. This cycle is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
Following, as he said, “an eastern religion,” Howard speaks of this cycle as “The Wheel of Life.” The life of nature depends upon the uninterrupted turning of this wheel. Howard’s work rested upon his conviction, obviously correct, that a farm needed to incorporate within its own working the entire revolution of the wheel of life, so that it too might remain endlessly alive and productive by obeying “Nature’s law of return.” When, thirty years ago, I wrote in a poem, “The farm is an infinite form,” this is what I meant.
The wheel of life is a form. It is a natural form, and it can become an artistic form insofar as the art of farming and the work of a farm can be made to conform to it. It can be made a form also of the art of living, but that, I think, requires an additional step. The wheel of human—that is, of fully human—life would consist over the generations of birth, growth, maturity, ripeness, death, and decay.
“Ripeness” is implicit in the examples of Lord Nelson and my friend Lily, but the term itself comes from act V, scene 2, of
King Lear, in which Edgar says to his father:
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.
By “ripeness” Edgar means a perfect readiness for death, and his sentence echoes “The readiness is all” in act V, scene 2, of Hamlet. In the wheel of human life, “ripeness” adds to the idea of biological growth the growth in a living soul of the knowledge of time and eternity in preparation for death. And after the addition of “ripeness,” “decay” acquires the further sense of the “plowing in” of experience and memory, building up the cultural humus. The art of living thus is practiced not only by individuals, but by whole communities or societies. It is the work of the long-term education of a people. Its purpose, we may say, is to make life conform gracefully both to its natural course and to its worldly limits. And this is in fulfillment of what Vermont Chief Justice Jeffrey L. Amestoy says is “our common responsibility...to imagine humanity the heart can recognize.”
What is or what should be the goal of our life and work? This is a fearful question and it ought to be fearfully answered. Probably it should not be answered for anybody in particular by anybody else in particular. But the ancient norm or ideal seems to have been a life in which you perceived your calling, faithfully followed it, and did your work with satisfaction; married, made a home, and raised a family; associated generously with neighbors; ate and drank with pleasure the produce of your local landscape; grew old seeing yourself replaced by your children or younger neighbors, but continuing in old age to be useful; and finally died a good or a holy death surrounded by loved ones.
Now we seem to have lost any such thought of a completed life. We no longer imagine death as an appropriate end or as a welcome deliverance from pain or grief or weariness. Death now apparently is understood, and especially by those who have placed themselves in charge of it, as a punishment for growing old, to be delayed at any cost.
We seem to be living now with the single expectation that there should and will always be more of everything, including “life expectancy.” This insatiable desire for more is the result of an overwhelming sense of incompleteness, which is the result of the insatiable desire for more. This is the wheel of death. It is the revolving of this wheel that now drives technological progress. The more superficial and unsatisfying our lives become, the faster we need to progress. When you are skating on thin ice, speed up.
The medical industry’s invariable unction about life-saving, healing, and the extended life expectancy badly needs a meeting on open ground with tragedy, absurdity, and moral horror. To wish for a longer life is to wish implicitly for an extension of the possibility that one’s life may become a burden or even a curse. And what are we to think when a criminalbecomes a medical emergency by the beneficence of nature, is accorded the full panoply of technological mercy, and is soon back in practice? The moral horror comes when the suffering or dementia of an overly extended life is reduced to another statistical verification of the “miracle” of modern medicine; or when a mental disease, such as the inability to face death or an ungovernable greed for more of everything, is exploited for profit.
Perhaps there is nobody now who has not benefited in some urgently personal way from the technology of the modern medical industry. To disregard the benefit is a falsehood, and to be ungrateful is inexcusable. But even gratitude does not free us of the obligation to be critical when criticism is needed. And there can be no doubt that the rapid development of industrial technology in medicine—and, as I am about to show, in agriculture—is much in need of criticism. We need to study with great concern the effects of introducing the mechanical and chemical procedures and quantitative standards of industry into the organic world and into the care of creatures. If this has given us benefits, it has also charged us and our world with costs that, typically, have been ignored by the accountants of progress. There is never, at best, an exact fit between the organic world and industrial technology. At worst, there is contradiction, opposition, and serious damage.
Industrial technology tends to obscure or destroy the sense of appropriate scale and of propriety of application. The standard of performance tends to be set by the capacity of the technology rather than the individual nature of places and creatures. Industrial technology, instead of adapting itself to life, attempts to adapt life to itself by treating life as merely a mechanical or chemical process, and thus it inhibits the operation of love, imagination, familiarity, compassion, fear, and awe. It reduces responsibility to routine, and work to “processing.” It destroys the worker’s knowledge of what is being worked upon.
II
The opposition of quantity and form in agriculture is not so immediately painful as in medicine, but it is more obvious. The medical industry has lifted the “norm” of life expectancy out of reach by proposing to extend longevity ad infinitum. Likewise, agricultural science, agribusiness, and the food industry propose to increase production ad infinitum, and this is their only aim. They will increase production by any means and at any cost, even at the cost of future productivity, for they have no functioning idea of ecological or agricultural or human limits. And since the agricultural economy is controlled by agribusiness and the food industry, their fixation on quantity is too easily communicated to farmers.
The art of farming, as I said earlier, fashions the farm’s cycle of productivity so that it conforms to the wheel of life. That is Sir Albert Howard’s language. In Wes Jackson’s language, the art of farming is to mimic on the farm the self-renewing processes of the local ecosystem. But that is not all. The art of farming is also the art of living on a farm. The form of a farm is partly in its embodied consciousness of ecological obligation, and thus in its annual cycle of work, but it is also in the arrangement of fields and buildings in relation to the life of the farm’s human family whose focus is the household. There is thus a convergence or even a coincidence between the form of a farm and the form of a farming life. The art of sustaining fertility and the art of living on a farm are mutually enhancing and mutually reinforcing.
A long view of an old agricultural landscape, in America and even more in Europe, would show how fencerows and fields have conformed over time both to natural topography and to human use, and how the location of dwellings, barns, and outbuildings reveals the established daily and seasonal patterns of work. In talking now about such farms in such landscapes, we are talking mostly about the past. Such farms were highly diversified and formally complex, and sometimes they were impressively sensitive (though perhaps no farm can ever be sensitive enough) both to the requirements of the place and to human need. The pursuit of higher and higher productivity has replaced those complex forms with the form (if it can be called that) of a straight line. The minimal formality of the straight line is even further attenuated because the line really is an arrow pointing toward nothing at all that is present, but toward the goal of even more production in the future. The line, it is proposed, will go on and on from one record yield to another. And the line of this determination is marked on the ground by longer and longer rows, which is to say larger and larger farms.
The exclusive standard of productivity destroys the formal integrity of a farm just as the exclusive standard of longevity destroys the formal integrity of a life. The quest for higher and higher production on farms leads almost inevitably to specialization, ignoring the natural impulsion toward diversity; specialization in turn obliterates local proprieties of scale and proportion and obscures any sense of human connection. Driven by fashion, debt, and bad science, the desire for more overrides completely the idea of a home or a home place or a home economy or a home community. The desire for quantity replaces the desire for wholeness or holiness or health. The sense of right proportion and scale cannot survive the loss of the sense of relationship, of the parts to one another and to the whole. The result, inevitably, is ugliness, violence, and waste.
Those of us who have watched, and have cared, have seen the old diverse and complex farm homesteads dissolving into an oversimplified, overcapitalized, market-determined agriculture that destroys farms and farmers. The fences, the fencerow plants and animals, the woodlots, the ponds and wetlands, the pastures and hayfields, the grassed waterways all disappear. The farm buildings go from disuse to neglect to decay and finally to fire and the bulldozer. The farmhouse is rented, dishonored, neglected until it too goes down and disappears. A neighborhood of home places, a diverse and comely farmed landscape, is thus replaced by a mechanical and chemical, entirely-patented agricultural desert. And this is a typical reductionist blunder, the success story of a sort of materialist fundamentalism.
By indulging a limitless desire for a supposedly limitless quantity, one gives up all the things that are most desirable. One abandons any hope of the formal completeness, grace, and beauty that come only by subordinating one’s life to the whole of which it is a part, and thus one is condemned to the life of a fragment, forever unfinished and incomplete, forever greedy. One loses, that is, the sense of human life as an artifact, a part made imaginatively whole.
(2004)
