What Are People For?. Wendell Berry

he tries himself and Thoreau and the river against modern times, and vice versa. The essay looks almost capriciously informal, but only a highly accomplished and knowledgeable writer could have written it. It is, among all else, a fine literary essay—such a reading of Walden as Thoreau would have wanted, not by the faceless automaton of current academic “scholarship,” but by a man outdoors, whose character is in every sentence he writes.

      I don’t know that that essay, good as it is, is outstanding among the many that Mr. Abbey has written. I chose to speak of it because Mr. Drabelle chose to speak of it, and because I think it represents its author well enough. It exhibits one of his paramount virtues as a writer, a virtue paramount in every writer who has it: he is always interesting. I have read, I believe, all of his books except one, and I do not remember being bored by any of them. One reason is the great speed and activity of his pages; a page of his, picked at random, is likely, I believe, to have an unusual number of changes of subject, and to cover an unusual amount of ground. Another reason is that he does not oversimplify either himself or, despite his predilection for one-liners, his subject. Another reason is his humor, the various forms of which keep breaking through the surface in unexpected places, like wet-weather springs.

      But the quality in him that I most prize, the one that removes him from the company of the writers I respect and puts him in the smaller company of the writers I love, is that he sees the gravity, the great danger, of the predicament we are now in, he tells it unswervingly, and he defends unflinchingly the heritage and the qualities that may preserve us. I read him, that is to say, for consolation, for the comfort of being told the truth. There is no longer any honest way to deny that a way of living that our leaders continue to praise is destroying all that our country is and all the best that it means. We are living even now among punishments and ruins. For those who know this, Edward Abbey’s books will remain an indispensable solace. His essays, and his novels too, are “antidotes to despair.” For those who think that a few more laws will enable us to go on safely as we are going, he will remain—and good for him!—a pain in the neck.

       1985