This post was written by Patrick Rist on April 19, 2007
The Wendell Berry short story, “Watch With Me,” from the collection by the same name (1994), revolves around the character Thacker Hample, a person given to “fits” and other bizarre behaviors, who one day picks up a neighbor’s loaded shotgun and wanders off into the woods after mentioning that he may kill himself.
The neighbor, Tol Proundfoot, begins following Thacker to make sure he doesn’t harm himself or anyone else. He sends word to other neighbors to come help, and for the rest of a long day and long night, Tol and his companions follow and watch Thacker from a distance as he meanders across their rural county.
This is not a lark for these men. They are aware that there is potential danger involved in what they are doing. They hardly speak to one another as they follow, and rarely even walk together. By the end of the story, which ends, if not happily, at least without tragedy, they are tired and hungry and behind in their work on their farms. Yet they do what they do without resentment and without complaint.
The men do not follow and watch after Thacker because he is their friend. Thacker is simply too backward and odd to be anyone’s friend. Rather, the men commit themselves to their task because both they and Thacker live together. In some way that probably none of them could defend or even articulate, this forces upon them an obligation to Thacker and to his welfare.
Thacker walks on alone. Yet he is far from alone.
Like most of Berry’s fiction, “Watch With Me” takes place before mass culture infiltrated every corner of our continent and our psyches. And also like most of his fiction as well as his nonfiction, Berry here holds up an ideal that we may not even be able to recognize, much less affirm.
The ideal is one of connectedness, or community, and the inherent obligation that arises from simply living in proximity to another. This is a hard teaching, and few of us can accept it.
Because for all the talk of “community” or “unity” today, both within the church and outside it, the simple fact is that we like living in a mass society. We like anonymity. We like going to the store and not having to speak to anyone or be recognized. We like not having to be involved with our neighbors’ lives, or even know their names, if we’d rather not. Who has time for it? We can now choose with whom we want to have “community,” and if it becomes messy or somehow disappointing, we can move on to someone else and have “community” with them.
And all this runs along rather smoothly, but with hidden costs. These costs become devastatingly visible when a Thacker Hample gets it in his addled brain to kill a few dozen of us.
Berry, who pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson actually calls a prophet, challenges us to hold some of our most unquestioned ways of life at a critical distance and try to see how odd they are in comparison to how most of the human race has lived through the centuries. But this is hard, and sometimes sounds like blame. It is not blame, but it is an attempt at being as clear-eyed as possible.
Is society somehow to blame for the horrors perpetuated at Virginia Tech this week? Of course not. We must affirm personal culpability; to do otherwise is simply reprehensible, especially in light of subsequent information discovered about the murderer.
But we must also acknowledge that we live in a society in which mobility, anonymity and sheer numbers of people make it possible for someone to be completely unknown by and disconnected to anyone else. This type of society has become normative for us; it is difficult to imagine any other way. We sometimes lose sight of its true perversity, and we seldom think about what it could be doing to us.
Neither you nor I nor Wendell Berry can do very much about mass society and its attendant anonymity. The fix is in, and it’s unlikely that a nation of 300 million is going to become less mass-oriented or impersonal. But for the sake of our own souls, perhaps we should be less glib about it, and more willing to contemplate the possibility that our “tastes” have become corrupted, like someone who prefers watching TV to walking in the woods, or McDonalds to a home cooked meal.
If we prefer anonymity to connection, if we prefer diversion to actually getting involved in others’ lives, and if we are content with cheap and easy “community-lite,” then perhaps we have been too deeply conditioned by our frenetic culture. Perhaps there is something there of which we should repent. We should ask our gracious God to change our tastes, and to protect us from the consequences of a system in which we have been all-too-willing participants.
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