One of the many great losses we've had this year was that of Wendell Berry.

If that name is new, he was a great American writer. He died at the end of August, at ninety-two, at home above the Kentucky River in Port Royal — population somewhere around a hundred, counting him. He had lived there since 1965, having given up a teaching job in New York City to come back to the county his family had farmed for generations. The New York writing establishment told him, more or less in unison, that he was committing professional suicide. He then spent the next sixty years writing more than fifty books about why he had done it, which is either a career or the longest rebuttal in American literary history.

Most people say that Berry is notable for the consistency of his whole production. He argued that people should stay put, and stayed put. He distrusted machinery that replaced good work, and farmed his hillside with draft horses. He wrote everything in pencil; his wife Tanya typed the manuscripts on a Royal Standard, a division of labor they maintained across sixty-nine years of marriage and defended, when challenged, with evident enjoyment. Most of us hold our convictions the way we hold an umbrella — firmly, until the weather improves. Berry held his like a fence post.

In 2012 the federal government gave him its highest honor in the humanities, the Jefferson Lecture, and flew him — one assumes after some negotiation — to the Kennedy Center in Washington to deliver it. He called it "It All Turns on Affection."

It's a story about tobacco, and it goes like this. One winter night in 1907, at the Berry home place in Henry County, Kentucky, two boys sat up listening while their parents talked over the uses they would have for the money from the 1906 tobacco crop. One of the boys, six years old, was Berry's father. The next morning the boys' father — Berry's grandfather — took the train to Louisville to see the crop sold at auction: a year of a family's work, cut, hung, cured, stripped, and loaded. By the time the sale had paid the freight and the commission on itself, there was nothing left. He came home with empty pockets, having paid for the privilege of the ruin.

There was no villain in the room, which is what makes the story durable. The villain was in New York, and his name was James B. Duke, whose American Tobacco Company had swallowed its competitors until there was, functionally, one buyer for a farmer's crop, and the one buyer named the price. Berry is careful in the lecture about this point: Duke was not cruel. The monopoly did not set out to victimize its victims; it simply did not notice them. Duke had grown up in the tobacco country of rural North Carolina — as a boy he would have known men like Berry's grandfather. But to an industrialist operating at his altitude, the life of one small grower was a rounding error. The farmers were ruined by a man to whom they were not quite real.

Then Berry did what he did best: he turned an old family grievance into a pair of spectacles and handed them to the audience.

The spectacles he borrowed from his teacher, Wallace Stegner, who had sorted the people of the American frontier into two kinds: boomers and stickers. Boomers, in Stegner's phrase, "pillage and run" — they come for the killing, and whether the killing is gold, timber, tobacco, or attention, they are gone the moment it is made, off to the next claim. Stickers settle. They are the ones, Berry said, who love the life they have made and the place they have made it in. Duke was a boomer of genius. Berry's grandfather was a sticker. The one long trip of his life took him south across Kentucky and into Tennessee, and when it was over he said: "I've looked with all the eyes I've got, and I wouldn't trade the field behind my barn for every inch I've seen."

Of course, if you ask a room of people which kind they are, the room votes sticker, unanimously, the way every driver on the road is above average. We like the sticker. He has a dog and a porch. But the test is not sentiment; it is the object of the motive. The boomer wants money, or perhaps something more palatable to say, like success, freedom, or a future — things that can be pursued anywhere and are therefore attached to nothing. The sticker wants a particular thing: this farm, this town, this marriage, this trade. And a particular thing can only be loved in place, at close range, over years. By that test the room's vote gets shakier. Berry turns the knife himself midway through the lecture: in the century since 1907, most of us have become Duke's people rather than his grandfather's — buying from everywhere, present nowhere, served daily by distant strangers we have never once imagined.

Which brings us to the word in his title. It all turns on affection — he lifted the line from a character in E. M. Forster's Howards End, and he meant it as economics, not valentine. Affection, in Berry's account, is not a warm feeling that simply happens to us. It is earned, in three steps. First you have to imagine a thing, and Berry means the word in its old sense: not making something up, but seeing it clearly enough that it becomes real to you. This field, not farmland; this neighbor, not the public. Once a thing is that real, you can feel for it, and that is sympathy. What you feel for long enough, you come to love, and that is affection. The chain runs one way only. You cannot love what you have never imagined, and if the first link rusts, the others go with it.

And there is the quiet horror of the Duke story. Much of the damage in the world is not done by cruelty. It is done by people to whom the damaged were never quite real — the farmer who did not appear in the magnate's mind, and all of that farmer's descendants: the town at the far end of the supply chain, the voice in the call center, the name on the chart, the neighbor whose actual Tuesday we have never once wondered about. Harm at scale is mostly a failure of imagination wearing the costume of a decision.

Seen this way, sticking is not a lifestyle preference, and it is certainly not a failure of ambition. It is the practice of letting a finite set of things become completely real to you. The sticker does not know less of the world than the boomer. He knows one piece of it all the way down — and things known that way have a strange habit of being cared for.

There is one more detail in the lecture, easy to miss on a first pass. In one of his difficult years, Berry's grandfather plowed a field on the lower part of a long slope and planted it in corn. A heavy rain came while the ground lay open, and on a slope, plowed soil has nothing to hold it; the field was badly eroded. Being a sticker, he neither walked away from the damage nor forgot it. He gave the rest of his life, as Berry puts it, first to healing the scars and then to his obligation of care. That is the whole creed in one field. The boomer's great privilege is that his mistakes are always in a place he has just left. The sticker lives inside his mistakes. They are in his view from the porch, and so he mends them, imperfectly, for years, because the field is real to him and he is going to have to keep looking at it. Berry looked at the same fields for sixty years, and in the end he died in sight of them — a man who was, to the last, entirely in the mind of his place, and it entirely in his.

Mr. Berry was an admirable man for staying put long enough to show us how it is done. Few of us will ever farm a hillside. But any of us can choose a few things — a place, a person, a piece of work — and stay with them until they are fully real to us. Imagination, sympathy, and affection.

John

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