Like Henry David Thoreau, one of his touchstone influences, Berry went back to the land — in his case, a farm in Henry County, Ky. — to live deliberately. Unlike Thoreau, he lacks a certain crucial insouciance.

It is impossible to imagine Berry writing, as did Thoreau, “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.” It’s almost impossible to imagine him, like Jefferson, another of his touchstone influences, really enjoying his wine.

Berry’s single-note essays make you recall Carlyle’s comment about Macaulay, that listening to him was okay for a while but “one wouldn’t live under Niagara.”

With the planet rapidly warming and the oceans acidifying, Berry seems more than ever a prophetic voice. Come for the thunder. Stay, if you can, to dip more occasionally into these writings, rummage around on their ocean floor and return to the surface with gleaming fragments.

Berry attended military school, and among his lessons was an observation that seems to presage our current chief of state: “Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence — and you have a tyrant.”

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

He’s always known exactly who he is. “I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed,” he writes. I live in a large city. But I admire his rejection of “the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well.”