Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer
By Wendell Berry
1987
Introduction:
(Originally Published in New England Review) Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.
My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it. A number by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones. The first is the one I mentioned at the beginning. I would hate to think that my work as a writer could not be done without a direct dependence on strip-mined coal. How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape?
Extract from
Unprocessed by Megan Kimble (pages 214-215)
(Megan Kimble) “I do not believe that ‘employment outside the house’ is as valuable or important or satisfying as employment at home for either men or women”, wrote Wendell Berry in his famous 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” … he declared that his work didn’t require a computer…Originally published in the New England Review, the essay appeared next in Harper’s magazine with reader comments alongside the piece. “Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative,” wrote one reader. “Wife – a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. Wife meets all of Beery’s uncompromising standards for technological innovation. She’s cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure.
Berry responded: “If I had written in my essay that my wife worked as a typist and editor for a publishing house, doing the same work that she does for me, no feminists, I daresay, would have written to Harper’s to attack me for exploiting her…It would have been assumed as a matter of course that if she had a job away from home she was a ‘liberated woman.’ Possessed of a dignity that no home could confer upon her.”
But…what makes for good work? If a wife edits her husband’s manuscripts because it contributes to the economic well-being of a shared household – and because she enjoys it – is this better work than what she might do for someone else, somewhere else, to earn a paycheck to contribute to that same? The better question might actually be: Is it more pleasurable? “More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more , we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement,” wrote Berry in a later essay, “Economy and Pleasure.” “We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there.”
Link to Berry’s “Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer” essay:
https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teach ... mputer.pdf
Link to Berry’s “Economy and Pleasure”:
https://www.omnifoo.info/images/Wendell ... asure.pdf
Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill
