Over the course of their long lives spent toiling on the frontiers of art and activism, it would be an understatement to say Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry have earned their keep. Together they've won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Humanities Medal, and an American Book Award. They've fought against unjust wars, raised awareness for environmental issues, inspired new generations of socially conscious citizens, and ultimately helped grease the wheel of America's countercultural revolution. If they broke a sweat, it's because they meant to.

And yet, more rewarding than all that is the friendship they continue to share. Whatever their differences -- one a Buddhist, the other Christian; one of the California foothills, the other rooted in Kentucky soil -- they are, on a more basic and unifying level, true kindred spirits. They are poets and writers, rugged individuals with calloused intellects. They each have a voracious spiritual appetite, content to let answers beget further questions, unafraid where they may lead.

But the true extent of their comradery is on fullest display in Distant Neighbors, a collection of selected letters between the two writers spanning four decades. Turn just a few pages of this inspiring collection and you'll begin to sense their warmth and the undeniable altruism of their aims. Dare I say it: you may just come out on the other side of this book a better person for having read it. For more on their open minds, virtuous hearts, and calm acceptance of the fragile balance between man and nature, enjoy an excerpt from their exchanges on the nature of good and evil below.

Excerpt from Distant Neighbors, edited by Chad Wriglesworth

Wendell Berry [PORT ROYAL, KY] to Gary Snyder [NEVADA CITY, CA]
4/22/78 (Saturday) [April 22, 1978]

Dear Gary and Masa,

Work was delayed so long by the late winter that when spring finally did come it seemed that everything had to be done at the same time. We got a lot done by going pretty hard and fast until Tuesday when the weather turned wet. We needed the rain badly, and so the consequent leisure was free-minded and good.

When I’ve had time I’ve been reading and making notes in preparation for my trip to Peru. The excitement of that is slowly growing — the thought of seeing an ancient American agriculture! Our early garden is mostly up. We have been eating fresh rhubarb; ought to have asparagus soon.

[…] Living at peace is a difficult, deceptive concept. Same for not resisting evil. You can struggle, embattle yourself, resist evil until you become evil — as anti-communism becomes totalitarian. I have no doubt of that. But I don’t feel the least bit of an inclination to lie down and be a rug, either, and I now begin to ask myself if I can live at peace only by being reconciled to battle. (Stonewall Jackson, a kind of ferocious saint, said he felt “as safe in battle [as] in bed” — is that satori?)

I am, I believe, a “non-violent” fighter. But I am a fighter. And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I once thought I would. So how to keep from becoming evil?

Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anything: don’t fight against even the devil, and don’t fight “to save the world.”

You’re in the same fix. How do you think about these things? I’d really like to know.

I send a poem. Love to you all.
Wendell

...

Gary Snyder [NEVADA CITY, CA] to Wendell Berry [PORT RO YAL, KY]
August 1, 1978

Dear Wendell —

How was the trip to Peru? I still owe you a response to a letter earlier this spring, on the question of bad land use, the nature of evil, and how one fights evil. I don’t have a clearcut answer to all that, but I would say that I try to reserve the term “evil” for the very highest quality of bad; not for just plain out stupidity. Most of the negative things that happen in the world are a function of ignorance, stupidity, narrow views, simple-minded egotism. Evil is probably a by-product of intelligent, complicated-minded egotism. What I think you are dealing with, near your own place, is not high-quality genuine evil, but the lower quality stuff. In which case, I would say use any honorable tactics that come your way in opposing and fighting such things, with no fear of becoming stained by “evil” because that’s not really what you’re up against. And of course true warriors have a code: never to draw a sword until all other possible avenues of resolution of conflict have been explored, and upon using a sword to use it with full effectiveness, but no more. At least that’s the Japanese teaching. As for whether there really is, or is not, a substantial metaphysical evil in the universe, my own hunch and received teachings have been that even the scariest and worst looking perversions or possibilities — satanic and luciferian — are ultimately enclosed within the totality of the organic process, and can be both understood and overcome...

Fraternally,

Gary

...

Wendell Berry [PORT ROYAL, KY] to Gary Snyder [NEVADA CITY, CA]
August 7, 1978

Dear Gary,

...Thank you for your note about evil. I see it, I think, pretty much your way. If you don’t see how much badness comes from stupidity, ignorance, confusion, etc. — if you don’t see how much badness is done by good, likeable people; if you don’t love, or don’t know you love, people whose actions you deplore — then I guess you go too far into outrage, acquire diseased motives, quit having any fun, and get bad yourself.

What I’m beginning to see as the highgrade badness that is evil is the assumption that there is no value or order that precedes or outranks the human — that there is no mystery, no occasion for awe or deference. In practice, this seems to manifest itself in the willingness to decide for other people, usually by way of technological feats: depletions of nature, production of lethal substances such as atomic wastes, genetic and reproductive “engineering,” etc. It is technological despotism.

Like you, I assume that in the long run nature includes what is done to it as well as what it does. I’m sure that human disorder and the extinction of humanity will be caught up in larger cycles and directed to more distant ends. At the same time, I’m biased in favor of the human species and of human good, and what seems to me a technological power and even willingness to change the definition of both so troubles and frightens me that evil seems the only word that will serve.

Will you be coming this way any time soon?

It was good to have your news. I was sorry to miss hearing you at Lindisfarne.

Your friend,
Wendell