This piece was originally featured in Cogitare’s Fall 2022 Print Edition
For fall break, I visited the home of a schoolfellow: a small farm near the Hudson River, where she was raised with her brother and two sisters alongside other self-sustaining families in a community heavily influenced by conservative Protestants.
I lived on the Hoffman homestead for three days. Before coming, I had vague guesses at what a farm was like; the Hoffman homestead was my first farm experience as a young adult and was vastly different from past experiences of farming – namely because I could participate in the work and life of the farm.
When my friend and I arrived late in the evening, we unfolded ourselves from the car and walked up the stone drive, up the porch steps and into the dim foyer. We turned into the living room, where a lamp glowed gold and Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman sat with Lasko and Ruby, the dogs. Books were stacked on the windowsill and under the side-table by the sofa. Books were on the mantle-piece. Books were on the desk and shelf opposite the fireplace. Sheepskins and a worn-out quilt covered the sofa, work boots were strewn about, and the Hoffmans greeted their daughter and me warmly.
We went into the kitchen to eat something before bed and passed through the dining room, which was filled with recently harvested bell peppers, tomatoes, and chestnuts, as well as wool and a spinning wheel. The kitchen – a small room with a tall ceiling and a wood floor – was the best place to be in the house. In my opinion, the kitchen ought to be the place in the home where everyone gathers and fellowships throughout the day.
This was where my friend and I spent most of our time when we were not outside or on an outing. To my right, upon immediately entering the kitchen, was a China cabinet filled with mismatched plates, bowls, and mugs; it also held a small black radio with which Mrs. Hoffman listened to the morning news and the rest of the family used for instrumental music and storage of miscellaneous pens and scraps of paper. On a windowsill sat various odds and ends: Mrs. Hoffman’s engagement ring in its green box, some glass pieces, and a chestnut. On the sink’s left was the main source of heat: the black woodstove. Pots and pans covered its surface, and Mrs. Hoffman pulled forward a pot of stew to warm on the front burner.
My friend and I warmed ourselves before it while eating buttered chestnuts and waiting for the stew. After the stove was a wooden counter under which the Hoffmans kept their kindling and some cut wood, and on which was a set of gas burners for more cooking space. Perpendicular to that, directly above the end of the counter, was a tall cabinet with much tea, some coffee, and baking supplies. Across from the China cabinet stood the small refrigerator. In the very center of the kitchen, its crowning glory, was what most modern interior designers would call an island. It was just the large fourth counter, the tall kitchen table, around and on which many things occurred throughout the day. On it when I first walked in was a bowl of produce. Some fruit flies circled above a sliced red onion and rested on a bowl of parsnips. Another bowl held scored and roasted chestnuts. A round glass container served as the butter dish and coarse salt in a wooden scoop. A gallon jar of milk was out. Day-old bread from a local bakery sat next to the bread knife. At both ends of this table were a thick wooden bench and a heavy wooden chest. Three stools migrated around it. In this kitchen the light was gold, and the stove was warm, and I knew that place to be a home.
After a bowl of stew, we went to bed. My friend showed me how to use the old shower, an old white bathtub with a hand-held nozzle that had to be fastened up above the curtain to a metal rod with a hair tie. I brushed my teeth and washed my face with water that stunk a little of sulfur, then I went to sleep in her sister’s bedroom, warm underneath a cotton down-stuffed quilt, my nose cold in the chilly room. The next morning, I wrestled with the shower (and took the fastest shower I have in a long time), dressed, and went downstairs. I cannot describe the feeling of joy at running down the stairs from the chilly second floor and bursting into the kitchen where it was warm and smelled of chai tea and milk and toasted bread.
The few days that followed began with mornings such as the first, and were filled with many activities: milking the cow, Millie, checking Mrs. Hoffman’s mushroom logs by the creek, gathering lettuce for salad, feeding the chickens, napping on the canvas swing and patio table, sewing leather, caning chairs, dancing until midnight to live music, singing for almost three hours, cooking, baking, setting up a small farmer’s market, scoring chestnuts, and conversing through it all.
Over lunch one day, my friend asked her father what he thought of “agrarianism.” Mr. Hoffman had either never heard the word or had not considered it before. Discussion of agrarianism is common here at Grove City, especially through the Fugitives. After we explained agrarianism to him and mentioned Wendell Berry, Mr. Hoffman said something along these lines: “You either have to do one thing to make enough money to pay someone else to do the rest of it, or you have to do everything – because once you start doing things yourself you won’t have enough time to pay someone else money to do the other things.” His statement is part of the agrarian virtues of self-sustenance, self-rule, and responsibility. His statement is also very Aristotelean. Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics:
Still, experience seems to contribute not a little; else they could not have become politicians by familiarity with politics; and so it seems that those who aim at knowing about the art of politics need experience as well…Even medical men do not seem to be made by a study of text-books…Surely, then, while collections of laws and of constitutions also, may be serviceable to those who can study them and judge what is good or bad and what enactments suit what circumstances, those who go through such collections without a practiced faculty will not have right judgement (unless it be as a spontaneous gift of nature), though they may perhaps become more intelligent in such matters.
Mr. Hoffman would not call his family agrarian because most of the agrarians philosophize about agrarianism and do not fully practice agrarianism. The philosophic stomping ground is where agrarianism has flourished and has been romanticized. Being a farmer could arguably be the most difficult vocation a man can undertake: weather is fickle, some years the harvest is not enough to last through winter, and animals fall ill. The Hoffmans can attest to that. If Wendell Berry or a Vanderbilt Agrarian analyzed the Hoffman homestead, however, their diagnosis would be agrarian.
I first encountered agrarianism last year through the Fugitives, a reading group on Grove City’s campus.We read Creed and Culture last year and had a spring symposium discussion on I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of twelve essays, each written by a Vanderbilt Agrarian and prefaced by a statement of principles. That statement of principles is used as the Fugitives’ constitution and outlines the purpose of agrarianism combating industrialism through distinguishing between southern and northern culture. Last year, the Fugitives, instead of catering to young academics who loved reading generally good books and talking about generally good things, began to cater towards those interested in a specific manifestation of good books and good things: that is, agrarianism. Living well by farming and gardening, , wearing handmade cotton, linen or wool clothes, smoking a pipe while watching the sunset, and demolishing industrialized society – all these became of interest to our group.
Agrarianism is appealing, especially when it is proposed as the best way for a man to live and fulfill his purpose as a human being. At its core, however, it goes against Christianity by failing to recognize the centrality of the Creator. But, like the Israelites stealing back their gold from the Egyptians, Christians can plunder rightful ways of living from agrarianism.
I enjoyed my time with the Hoffmans very much; I worked with my hands, read in the mornings, and partook of good food and fellowship. But one thing, or rather, Someone, was missing. Before lunch and dinner, we would gather round the table and sing: “For health and strength and daily bread, we praise Thy name, O Lord.” Then, we would take hands, and, gently bouncing our clasped hands on the stressed syllables, say, “Blessings on the meal!”
That was the only religious ritual. Agrarianism, like all other isms, is, at its very heart, a philosophy: “It began, as all philosophies should begin, by considering man in relation to creation.”[2] Man’s highest duty, according to agrarianism, is to the physical soil he lives on, ploughs, seeds, harvests, and dies on. His duty is not to God but to Mother Nature. Why is agrarianism then seen as good? Mr. Richard Weaver, a man who followed in the steps of the twelve Vanderbilt Agrarians, provides the reason for agrarian philosophy in an essay called “The Southern Phoenix:”
Agriculture as “the best and the most sensitive vocation” makes its contribution to the good life. It keeps man in contact with nature, whose presence he ought to remain aware of; it imparts to his living a rhythm which is natural and not mechanical. Agrarian orders have been characterized by stability, whereas industrial societies, through the very character of their expansion and “progress,” have proved notoriously unstable.
Living in accordance with the natural world certainly provides the greatest stability. What is unnatural, by its own definition, cannot be sustained since it is not natural. Again, why is agrarianism good? Because it is in direct accordance and harmony with the natural.
Why is it good for man to work the ground? to make his own clothes? to run downstairs from the cold bedroom to the warm kitchen? to milk a cow? to sew his own smoking pouch? to gather with his family around the kitchen table and say grace? to sing for three hours?
First, doing these things is better than being a passive cog in a bureaucratic system that eschews individual responsibility. Second, these things point man to the highest Good, who is also Truth and Beauty. God calls man to take care of His creation and His creatures, singing and fellowship reflect the relationship of the Trinity, and doing handiwork and creating things is part of imago dei. In ending, I turn again to the intellectual agrarian Mr. Weaver:
Every culture is a response to the need of human beings for certain psychic fulfillments, which cannot be described in the language of material exchange. They depend upon the appreciation of a set of intangibles, and it is impossible to account rationally for the way in which these sort out, dispose, arrange, and settle things. The master impulse of every culture seems to come from some kind of vision, some idealization of a value which can never be translated literally. Culture is akin to religion in that it may ask us to believe absurd things and perform useless ones; and indeed cultural fulfillment never seems complete without some kind of religious orientation. Culture has been described as a bridge between strictly religious ideas and the mundane concerns of life.
Our current need, a need we have had since the Fall and after the Ascension, is for continued renewal and revival. We need a culture that is founded on the Christian vision and fulfilled with an orientation towards the crucified and risen Christ who will return. The culture must be the bridge between our souls and our bodies, the thing which undergirds and encircles our worship and our work.
If that means being a half-hearted agrarian and a full-blooded Christian, then I am going to try my hardest to live on a farm, whether I have a field and pasture or raised beds on my apartment balcony and flowerpots in my kitchen window.
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