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September 18, 2026
from “An Entrance to the Woods”
in Recollected Essays 1965-1980
by Wendell Berry
“What I am leaving, is something to look forward to.”
We have had two monumental deaths in the essay world: Wendell Berry on August 31 and Annie Dillard on September 16. To honor Berry we will reprieve a feature we did in 2017 and, since we will be away from the computer for several weeks, it will run until October 9 when we will do a feature on Annie Dillard.
Poet, novelist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry lived in Port Royal, Kentucky near his birthplace, where he had maintained a farm for over 50 years. Mistrustful of technology, he held deep reverence for the land and was a staunch defender of agrarian values. He is the author of over 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His writing celebrates the holiness of life and everyday miracles often taken for granted.
Our Paragraph of the Week is from his essay “An Entrance to the Woods” which describes his attempt to leave civilization behind by hiking into the Daniel Boone National Forest near Pine Ridge Kentucky.
The Paragraph of the Week
The moon is bright and high. The woods stands in deep shadow, the light falling soft through the openings of the foliage. The trees appear immensely tall, and black, gravely looming over the path. It is windless and still; the moonlight pouring over the country seems more potent than the air. All around me there is still that constant low singing of the insects. For days now it has continued without letup or inflection, like ripples on water under a steady breeze. While I slept it went on through the night, a shimmer on my mind. My shoulder brushes a low tree overhanging the path and a bird that was asleep on one of the branches startles awake and flies off into the shadows, and I go on with the sense that I am passing near to the sleep of things.
—Wendell Berry
Commentary
In “An Entrance to the Woods,” Wendell Berry walks into the Daniel Boone National Forest near Pine Ridge Kentucky to escape the “roar of the highway” that is “the voice of the American economy,” the “machinery and the workings of an insane greed.” It takes a while. The first night he is lonely, and on his second day, climbing zigzag paths to an overlook, he can still hear the Mountain Parkway, “a steady continuous roar.” But he had come to “enlarge rather than diminish the hope of life,” so he presses on. Eventually the highway sound subsides. Free of “all superfluities” that he could not carry on his back, he is reduced to his “irreducible self,” as he walks through “the landscape as one of its details.” He leaves the trail and descends into the pathless woods following a stream that “seems sunk in a deep contented meditation on the sounds of l.” The stream itself is a clear and pristine world. “If it weren’t for the shadows and ripples,” he writes, “you would hardly notice it is water; the fish would seem to swim in the air.” Before dawn on his last day, the moonlight “seems more potent than the air.” The buzzing of insects, which registered as a “shimmer” in his mind as he slept, continues in his waking state. Preparing to leave, he passes “near to the sleep of things.” If he were to stay another day it would be even better, he thinks, realizing that “to renew the life of that possibility” was the reason he entered the woods in the first place. “What I am leaving,” he writes, “is something to look forward to.”
—THE
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The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
