I discovered my first Wendell Berry novel, Hannah Coulter, through my book club. This book and the others portraying the mythical Port William, Kentucky, community are not suspenseful thrillers, the ones we hurry through to conclusion, then forget the next day. They are not tales of great tragedy or outrage, simply the telling of tender sorrows and joys of a community.

Berry’s stories chronicle the time when machine labor was replacing the labor of humans and their animals. In one of Berry’s short stories “A New Day (1949)” from A Place in Time, tractors have all but replaced horse-drawn farm machines. A young man, still with a team of horses, has trained them to become“the felt thought of a man, so that while their effort lasted he would not, he could not, distinguish between himself and them.” One could not picture such a relationship with a tractor.

I am not a Luddite fulminating against machines. I certainly don’t want to go back to scrubbing clothes in a tub. Machines free us in many way. But we have lost something in distancing ourselves, not only from animal labor, but from a life closer to the physical world and to our neighbors on whom we depend.

One could say Berry’s fiction idolizes a past life that, in reality, wasn’t ideal for everyone: victims of color or ethnicity, an ingrown culture, and poverty. The strength of the stories lies in reminding us of the precious small worlds that we have lost in our quest for more things.

Maybe we can use our supposed free time to grow our inner and outer worlds, to mature as well as to rescue the human misery that lurks at the edges of our new creations. However, it seems we often use the release from back breaking labor merely to make more money to buy more things that increasingly disconnect us from each other.