Wendell Berry was the fixed center of the figure-eight of life, the point to which all things returned. He was a man of uncommon intention, fixed in his moral universe and in his ways, writing by hand in daylight and carefully tending his small farm. He was opposed to all things big, business or government or any forward-pushing sense of progress. He was a tribune of an agrarian American soul, cast adrift but never forgotten, an Arcadia to which a diverse array of movements today struggle to return, feeling in the dark for something they have lost.

I had the pleasure of seeing Berry deliver the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center after receiving an honor for the National Endowment for the Humanities. “It all turns on affection,” he named his talk, and while the lecture had its share of measured disdain for the so-called march of progress, polemics were never Berry’s natural state. Everything he wrote and believed was rooted in a story of love for a place and its people, and everything followed from those roots of affection. I do not share Berry’s intense anti-modernism, but his voice is a persistent, nagging reminder, always raising questions about certain seeming inevitabilities. He achieves this not through tight rational argument (though he can do it well), but by turning back to a core commitment he invites his readers to share. With a grounding in affection, so many other choices in life are straightforward and clear. Not easy, mind you, but clear.

In his own way, Berry was just as much a dreamer as the ambitious souls he eyed warily around him. At one point in life he was among their number, studying at Stanford and on a Guggenheim and in two years in New York. But his core knew where it belonged, and his great mentor from the Palo Alto days, Wallace Stegner, no doubt further seeded that rootedness. Everything since, whether in farming or essays or fiction, went back to his native Kentucky hill country. It was the place that made him whole, and even as the world changed and people moved on, and he made it his life’s mission to preserve that place, both in acts and in words, and thereby carry it forward. It was a radical, powerful act; it was one the world needed, and it needs more of them.

Of all his work I enjoyed his fiction most. The world of Port William, Kentucky comes to life in measured, careful prose, a matter-of-fact reality put forth for readers to feel deeply, even if they’ve never made their way to the Bluegrass State. Hannah Coulter let me understand my grandmother in a way lived experience never quite could. The idiosyncratic faith and persistence in Jayber Crow is a study in how to tell a tale to share a worldview, instead of beating it in directly. By re-imagining his roots in a fictional world, Berry conferred a certain immortality on the farms and fields and woodlands he called home. He also found a distance to reflect on his life and those of others around him, to wrap them in warmth even when their lives went awry. A writer can love his characters and still find ways to have them tell us troubling truths.

His passing at 92 is a testament to a life well-lived, and while it would be easy to turn elegiac and imagine him passing from a world that had left him behind, the whole point of Wendell Berry was that he was rooted in a different wisdom. Even in death, he will continue to whisper his persistent lines in our ears. Rest in peace in your beautiful home, Mr. Berry, and someday let’s share a bourbon on a front porch and imagine again what our affection can bring forth.