Wendell Berry, in his 92nd year of life, has just come out with a new novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. Counting the books listed on the page before the title page, it is the 15th in a series of novels and books of short stories about the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. Within this great story, we are saved from the machines which now more than ever mimic the human likeness and sell it short for something less than the divine. While the story is fictional, the entire series of books is about Berry’s life, a life to be understood as a membership in a community that, in its wholeness, both transcends time and sanctifies its space. In that community, he writes, each member is already anticipated in the stories of those who came before, as they will be bound to those who come after as listeners. And its fervent and reasonable hope is that listeners will become participants themselves. Berry makes the case of all who have told stories from the beginning of humankind — all our lives are stories, bound up in stories and passed on as stories. The characters in the books of the Port William stories do not have the exact names of the people Berry knew or heard of in his community’s living treasury of stories about itself. Neither are the happenings in most of these stories exact renderings of the ephemera of the lives of those people that he knew, first or second hand. But in the telling of the stories, the gist of who those people are lives. And as it is alive, it propagates itself further in each telling, and propels the reader by vital and moral force to find some way to be a part of the tale. In these stories, the place where the stories occur is always present. For Berry it is the key. Acceptance of being placed in the world guides us to measure our lives by how we inform that place with our love, a love that we discover already flowing from the place to us, sustaining us in every way our love opens our eyes to see. Berry sees clearly the great idolatry of modern man is the worship of our own abstractions, a worship which crowds out acknowledgement of the miraculousness of the world that God has made and challenges us from the very get-go of the Bible to see as He does: It is good, it is very good. Berry’s story of a place and the people in it is one of lives and their stories nested within each other, energizing and defining alike the characters and the storytellers and their place with each telling. The distinctiveness of the place in which their stories play out gives the loves definition, focus, and feeling. At the end of this volume, in his acknowledgments, Berry writes, “This book is based upon a ‘real story,’ which, because it is mostly undocumented, must be told as fiction.” From this far outpost in his tenth decade on earth, this is true of this entire series — without the precision of documentation, the truth must be sought in a truthful narrative. In that story, the irrecoverable minutiae bequeath their meaning to the faithful storyteller, whose success is subject to the assent of the reader. Here is the most ancient form of empiricism, in which the veracity of the life described is tested in the reader’s soul. These stories of Port William pass the test. They do so even as the author mourns the passing of the way of life that sustained his characters and his ancestors and their community. Our culture, his art demonstrates, has abstracted us from our place on earth and left us as wounded in our soul as the land is wounded in its neglect. This is the great burden of the book and of this great series of books, a burden which Berry takes on squarely. And so, like so much of our life, it is a story of hope and of failure. By virtue of his telling the story, and of our reading it, the storyteller (and all hearers and readers of the story are meant to become tellers) stands simultaneously above and within all the times of his multigenerational story. Andy, the the character that represents Berry himself reflects: And so Andy has had to see himself, grown old, a man of his own time who might say … “What we wanted was to make a life and a way of life, here in this place, that our children and their children could take from us and carry on. And each of us, in his own way in his own time, has failed.” At the end, this truthful record of failure met with resilience and hope echoes the great story underlying our civilization. The community of Kentucky tobacco growers embodied the ideal of independence and self-governance. Because of there independence, not in contradiction to it, they shared work with each other and joined with each other to run locally a program that allows their crop a fair price despite the power of the tobacco monopolists. Their life with each other was lived in close partnership with the land which yielded their crops, with their animals who gave their bodies to the work and for their meat, and with the trees and plants which gave them fuel and food as well as their cash crop. The triumph of machines blew this world apart after World War II. The war’s fury had taken the bodies of many of its men, its deeper effects played out after the war was over. After the world had collapsed into opposition and violence, so now did the community slowly fall, its humanity and its closeness to the land no longer having market value. Abstractions of economics and politics and the insensate power of machines made this human community its victims. The knowledge of how to make such an independent life must be regained, just as today, if we want to start shipbuilding again in America, we will  have to find a way to regain all that knowledge that used to reside within those who worked the trade. In Port William and in much of small farm America, the old way of life left and nothing much replaced it. Its living core was gutted. The precise art of farming that matched the land and the community that shared the meaning of the independent work it did together were replaced with little work at all and drugs as the a meaningless, bitter, and deadly comfort. What is left after all this subtraction? Have we lost the knowledge of independence, with its real communities and its love of neighbors? It may be, the author realizes, aside from the Amish and a few other outliers, it is the book in the reader’s hands. But this book’s story that is so real and well told that it enters the soul and spurs our own storytelling, which itself is the core of human community. There is an old midrash, a recording of a discussion between a rabbi and his student, from about 1,900 years ago. In it, the teacher, Rabbi Akiva proposes as the organizing principle of all Scripture Leviticus’ command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Everything else, whether personal or communal, he teaches, is build upon this principium. His student, Ben Azzai disagreed and proposed another verse, Genesis 5:1: “This is the story of the offspring of Adam: In the day that God created Adam, it was in the likeness of God that He created him.” Ben Azzai was saying that even love depends on something else — of being a part and in some essential way resembling the One who is most lovable. Then we can love ourselves and so love each other, and the world that holds us and sustains us as we build a loving community. This is the story of humankind, told by its Great Author, and entrusted to us to tell in our own words together. So much of the story is about loss. As the character Andy realizes, as we find in the Bible, so much that was good is lost. Even more: we are implicated in the loss. Again, his words: “And each of us, in his own way in his own time, has failed.” But as in the Bible, this is not the end. Tried by our losses, what we stand for, what is true and everlasting, is not and cannot be diminished. In our humanity, fashioned by God in His own likeness, is that which is good and beautiful and invincible. It only becomes clear in the telling, for the teller’s love lives on in the tale, a love which only increases, for all the world’s ephemeral subtraction, as it is told and brings one more life into its story. Andy’s realization at the end of the book has the feel of Scripture, finding its tongue in the American idiom, in America’s own telling the tale of itself, nested inside its own reading and retelling the tale of Israel trying, failing, and returning to try again to live within the love that calls it into being again and again. He began to waken into his memory and the memory of his elders. It was as if  his soul had learned, so to speak, to stand outside his own life in the great opening in which time comes and goes, in the company and council of other souls. In reveries and dreams he makes his way among loved ones lost to one another in this world’s great sundering, as if again in their presence and present to them, as if in some hereafter already here. Within this great story, we are saved from the machines which now more than ever mimic the human likeness and sell it short for something less than the divine, less than realized love. The promised windfall profit is always paid in debased currency, at most pennies on the dollar, before the pennies are discontinued. None of the promises of this world hold if we sell our humanity, split ourselves from that divine image so responsive and pained by the smallest hurt or damage, so invincible that it rises again and again to establish love’s community as sovereign in this world. Here are Andy’s words, evincing that triumph as it must be — by work infused with the redemptive knowledge of this very world as it is loved by God: His remembering and thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to him, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that is yet the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it. Andy — and Berry — are not selling us this story as a panacea. It is only by learning to love even in defeat and in loss that our own love can come to a triumph that transcends time even as it redeems it. That is not something that a slogan, an algorithm, an economic theory, or even a political philosophy can deliver on its own. But that love can and must inform all these things. It is a love stronger than death. In setting the work of this love in the first place, we than can make our own economics, politics, and every small bit of our lives tell this great story. It is this above all things, this in the first place, that we must conserve, cherish, and pass on. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Trivializing Religion Left Us Unprepared for Political Islam False Confidence Against Jihadism The West Learned From Defeat. So Must Islamic Civilization.