I Am Not Hamlet

When I am called, as to my astonishment I sometimes am, a devotee of "simplicity" (since I live supposedly as a "simple farmer"), I am obliged to reply that I gave up the simple life when I left New York City in 1964 and came here [his farm in Kentucky--sfm].  In New York, I lived as a passive consumer, supplying nearly all my needs by purchase, whereas here I supply many of my needs from this place by my work (and pleasure) and am responsible besides for the care of the place.                                                                     --Wendell Berry, "Imagination in Place"

Published in 1930 by a group of 12 Southern writers based in Vanderbilt College, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition is a collection of essays issued as a stay against further industrialization of the South. Obviously they failed. In many respects the South is no different from any other region in the US. Regionalism has given way to a corporatized banality. The last bastion of yeoman farmers lost out to Detroit and other industrial powerhouses in the late 30s and 40s. At times racist and patronizing, bitter and nostalgic, prophetic and prescient, I'll Take My Stand desperately tries to convince the South to keep her identity, but to no avail. The essays offer no practical advice, merely polemic, but some of them...whew. What would the world be like if their ideas had prevailed? There is no way of knowing...at least not until the oil runs out. And that shouldn't happen for another 250 years--right?

So long as the industrialist remains in the saddle there must be a money crop to pay him taxes, but let it occupy second place. Any man who grows his own food, kills his own meat, takes wool from his lambs and cotton from his stalks and makes them into clothes, plants corn and hay for his stock, shoes them at the crossroads blacksmith shop, draws milk and butter from his cows, eggs from his pullets, water from the ground, and fuel from the woodlot, can live in an industrial world without a great deal of cash. Let him diversify, but diversify so that he may live rather than that he may grow rich [my emphasis]. In this way he will escape by far the heaviest form of taxation, and if the direct levies grow too exorbitant, refuse to pay them. Make those who rule the country bear the burdens of government. --Andrew Nelson Lytle, "The Hind Tit" The heaviest form of taxation that Lytle is talking about (he's writing in the 1930s about Southern farmers) is all the "p...