I've found my way back. After reading his book of essays entitled "Imagination in Place" and his collection stories A Place in Time, and being moved, provoked, inspired, even at times overwhelmed, by both, I meandered back into his neck of the woods, taking out his book of essays Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community and his novel Hannah Coulter.
It seems to me that Berry is scarily right on almost everything he says. Of course, this overstates things. I've read the title essay of his book, and it shook me, re-opened some wounds of mine, and even left me feeling slightly giddy with hope for a better world.
It's important to note that Berry's conception of sexuality is as profound as it is unsexy. Unsexy, that is, in light of how we've come to regard all things erotic. Berry is not a Bible-thumper, but he is a practicing Christian, and he believes deeply in the centrality of sex to the life not only of the family but of the community. For Berry, sex is the kernel from which all life - familial, communal, artistic, you-name-it - springs. In an industrial, modern culture that devalues persons and communities, sex must also be devalued, must lose its sense of propriety, of awe, of dignity, and even of pleasure.
The knee-jerk reaction of the would-be liberal cosmopolitan is that, at the very least, this overstates things. Berry isn't given anything close to his due in liberal circles for many of the same reasons that Chomsky isn't; he is a true prophet, and much of what he says, while true, goes radically against the grain of the cultural elite. He trucks in truths that are elusive, inconvenient, upsetting.
I will admit to being deeply, even profoundly receptive to Berry's ideas, which is not at all to say that I agree with them entirely, or that my receptiveness isn't colored, even deepened, but a healthy amount of discomfort and skepticism. At times, Berry can seem every bit the fusty, musty ol' coot that he seems to imagine himself as appearing to many of his more, shall we say, urbane readers. He seems to have too high standards for the world, to be atavistic, to harken back to some imagined, irrevocable utopia, a veritable American Eden of community and fellowship. He can seem naive, a bit quaint, even perhaps a little daft (although he is always lucid.) At worst, he can seem irrationally prejudiced: that his longing for his lost, paved-over paradise has curdled into bitterness, and his punctilious good manners and wry stoicism are covering for a dangerous, acid resentment that threatens to boil over.
But I don't really think that's the case. Berry can be cranky, but he always seems to be so with appropriate reserve and self-awareness, and always to temper his crankiness, even his palpable anguish, with hope, humor, and affection for what he cherishes and seeks to preserve in the world. His voice, as lonely as it can seem at times among the literary firmament, is not a voice of despair.
I don't know if I go all the way with him on his rejection of all sex that exists outside the sacrament of marriage. (He isn't a demagogue - he is patently and emphatically not one, since he speaks of real causes and effects, not conjured abstractions of Sin and Purity.) He is right to mark the ways in which sex is degraded and degradation has been made to seem sexy, and how that degradation always extends to people and to the culture at large. But I wonder if it's possible to have a middle ground. Can we allow ourselves to be sexual with those who are other than our spouses? What of sexual play and experimentation - practiced since the dawn of humanity, even in some of the local, communal cultures that Berry is fond of citing as examples of belonging and cohesiveness?
It's liberating to read Berry, because he makes me feel sane. But there is part of me that wonders - how do I live? What do I do now?
