{"id":49297,"date":"2026-09-05T15:08:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T15:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wendell-berry-on-solitude-and-the-two-great-enemies-of-creative-work\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T15:08:26","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T15:08:26","slug":"wendell-berry-on-solitude-and-the-two-great-enemies-of-creative-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wendell-berry-on-solitude-and-the-two-great-enemies-of-creative-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Wendell Berry on Solitude and the Two Great Enemies of Creative Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTrue solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One\u2019s inner voices become audible\u2026 In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.\u201d<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>\u201cOne can\u2019t write directly about the soul,\u201d<\/em> Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary<\/a>. Few writers have come to write about it \u2014 and to it \u2014 more directly than the novelist, poet, and environmental activist Wendell Berry<\/a> (August 5, 1934\u2013August 31, 2026), who describes himself as \u201ca farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts.\u201d In his wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collection What Are People For?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), Berry addresses with great elegance our neophilic tendencies<\/a> and why innovation for the sake of novelty sells short the true value of creative work.<\/p>\n

Novelty-fetishism, Berry suggests, is an act of vanity that serves neither the creator nor those created for:<\/p>\n

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Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty \u2014 the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.<\/p>\n

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill. <\/p>\n

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Wendell Berry (Photograph: Guy Mendes)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Berry paints pride and despair as two sides of the same coin, both equally culpable in poisoning creative work and pushing us toward loneliness rather than toward the shared belonging that true art fosters:<\/p>\n

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There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair \u2014 done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision. <\/p>\n

Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much. <\/p>\n

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life. <\/p>\n

For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?<\/p>\n

Good work finds the way between pride and despair. <\/p>\n

It graces with health. It heals with grace. <\/p>\n

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift. <\/p>\n

By it, we lose loneliness: <\/p>\n

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; <\/p>\n

we enter the little circle of each other\u2019s arms, <\/p>\n

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance, <\/p>\n

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Illustration from Wild<\/em><\/a> by Emily Hughes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Echoing Thoreau\u2019s ode to the woods<\/a> and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips\u2019s assertion that cultivating a capacity for \u201cfertile solitude\u201d<\/a> is essential for creative work, Berry extols the ennobling effects of solitude, the kind gained only by surrendering to nature\u2019s gentle gift for quieting the mind:<\/p>\n

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We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness\u2026 <\/p>\n

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. <\/p>\n

One\u2019s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one\u2019s most intimate sources. <\/p>\n

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The return from such humanizing solitude, Berry cautions, can be disorienting:<\/p>\n

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From the order of nature we return to the order \u2014 and the disorder \u2014 of humanity. <\/p>\n

From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it. <\/p>\n

One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human. <\/p>\n

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest. <\/p>\n

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest. <\/p>\n

In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, so deep is our pathology of human striving that even Thoreau, a century and a half ago, memorably despaired<\/a>: \u201cWhat business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?\u201d<\/em> But the value of such recalibration of our connectedness in solitude, Berry suggests, is that it reminds us of the artist\u2019s task, which is to connect us to one another. He returns to the subject of despair and pride, which serve to separate and thus betray the task of art:<\/p>\n

\n

The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field, so that the wheel of life will turn, and the dying be met by the newborn.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

But it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.<\/p>\n

To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure.<\/p>\n

It is despair that sees the work failing in one\u2019s own failure. <\/p>\n

This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But Berry\u2019s most urgent point has to do with the immense value of \u201cthoroughly conscious ignorance\u201d<\/a> and of keeping alive the unanswerable questions that make us human<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers. <\/p>\n

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner. <\/p>\n

In ignorance is hope.<\/p>\n

Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to. <\/p>\n

They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All of the essays in What Are People For?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> are imbued with precisely this kind of light-giving force. Complement it with Berry on what the poetic form teaches us about the secret of marriage<\/a>, then revisit Sara Maitland on the art of solitude<\/a>, one of the year\u2019s best psychology and philosophy books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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donating = loving<\/h3>\n

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\u201cTrue solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One\u2019s inner voices become audible\u2026 In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.\u201d \u201cOne can\u2019t write directly about the soul,\u201d Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. Few writers have come to write about it \u2014 and to it \u2014 more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 12:12:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}