Nothing is Going to Happen Here

Wendell Berry has been on my mind quite a bit these recent days. 

Spoiler alert, in case there was any question: the title pretty much captures everything—feel free then to let it spare you a thousand or so words to come.

Drifting in and through consciousness, Berry's work surfaces for me seemingly at random, imposing no particular agenda, but rarely showing up empty-handed. There’s always some sort of an offering. Whether it is in well-worn poems long tucked into the back pocket of my mind, or through lives of well-loved characters, ordinary people living ordinary lives: Wendell Berry always brings insight, extended as a humble gift. Take it or leave it. 

Jayber Crow is by far my favorite—of all those many ordinaries letting the loneliness of their lives unfold in the fictionalized town of Port William. From the small-town pulpit of his barber's chair, Jayber’s slow days sing of a simple kind of life: one free from the tyrant of possibility and the pursuits of becoming.

Once though, in another time, Jayber was an aspiring preacher. But now, post finding or failure, however you might decide to see it, something profoundly spiritual unfolds from the irreverent barbershop perch he's settled into. Say whatever you will of Jayber Crow or other waywards, the kind of folk of which Wendell Berry writes know something about living sacramentally.  

A few days ago I was discussing generative artificial intelligence with a friend. And sure enough, Berry shows up, unsurprisingly. Any motivation or willingness to engage, we agreed, comes for us with great reluctance, begrudgingly; truthfully it would just be far more preferential to ignore it all. 

AI is annoying. I’m not sure there’s anything more succinct or thoughtful to say at the moment on the topic.

“I just don’t want to fade into obscurity though,” my friend said. And I thought of Berry—of the pace of his farmland life, and his words on How To Be a Poet:

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Would obscurity really be so bad?, I wondered. 

I’m often tempted to believe the various machines around us are the problem. Maybe surrendering the process of our becoming just doesn’t deliver on all the hype, after all. It’s all really part of a rather familiar story though: people commissioning out the monotony of living to the easiest, most convenient bidder—whatever new distraction promises a break from the doldrum days of being human. 

Build bigger, move faster, live longer, do more. And wherever and whenever it can be avoided, why bother with any of the labor ourselves?

For all my begrudging though, I have to admit the air conditioning would be an especially difficult bad machine habit to break, if I’m being honest.

Nonetheless, I am bored with the promise of progress.

That’s not really true. At least not fully. I don’t really believe it, though it does have a nice sound to it, so I’ll let it stand, at least for now. In all truth I really tend to be quite addicted to possibility. And with that I’m starting to see what I actually mean in all this meandering—which I promise to get around to eventually, albeit slowly.   

First though, Annie Dillard. Because I stumbled over a line in Holy the Firm that absolutely arrested me, and it’s been ringing in my mind for days now. 

“Nothing is going to happen in this book,” Dillard writes. “There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.”

Her audacity is striking. Here’s a highly acclaimed author admitting something honest and doing so without apology: there is no plot, no grand climax or resolution, and no deliverables to be found here. Nothing is going to happen. What did you come expecting to find?

Dillard's descriptions of the cobwebs gathering in the corner and the view from her window is really it: nothing more is going to take place. This is it what it's all about. It's all just living. And that's all it's ever been about.

Set all your assumptions and self-justifying accolades aside then—they won't be of service here.

Clarity like this—and the humility to admit and share it—is rare. So often it feels as though we're surrounded by an ever-constant clamor of self-aggrandizing activity and fabricated importance. Amid all that noise, Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard stand up like prophets and boldly—though ever-so-quietly—enter into their lives, however monotonous or inconvenient the truth of living may at times be.

I am learning, I admit with an internal ego recoil, that I’m not as good at becoming as I want to think.

At being in process, I mean. For as much time and attention as I devote to bearing witness to becoming, I would really much rather avoid plodding along that labyrinthian pilgrimage myself. Because a thing in process happens nowhere else but in present time—not the romanticized lens of a nostalgic past or idealized future. Admittedly, in a world outside the process-denying realm of LinkedIn profiles, which is really the only world that truly is, I lack some proficiency; it's more easy to stay in a place of accomplishment and completion.

"It is the law of all progress," Teilhard de Chardin tells, "that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time."

As tempting as bypassing the path may at times be, I am hungry for the REAL.

And by god am I bored with so-called "generative" substitutes—with false promises and shortcuts and cheap alternatives to authenticity. There is but one life to consecrate and enter into. Spare me all others, please. 

I think our souls get tired not by possibility, progress, or process—but rather the denial, resistance, and self-imposed shame of becoming.

In all of this, Teilhard de Chardin offers a blessing: “Accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”