Wendell Berry Entrance Jigsaw

Wendell Berry “An Entrance to the Woods”

Jigsaw

Learning Goal:

After presentations from each group, students should be able to explain the four stages of this narrator’s “entrance to the woods” and how this is indicative of the modern natural experience and ecocentric transcendence.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCEPTS:

SOCIETAL SELF:

NATURAL SELF:

ANTHROPOCENTRISM:

ECOCENTRISM:

MACHINE IN THE GARDEN:

EXPANDED TEMPORAL AWARENESS:

EXPANDED SPATIAL AWARENESS:

EXPANDED SPIRITUAL AWARENESS:

SIMPLICITY:

INTERDEPENDENCE OF EARTH’S ECOSYSTEMS:

INNER AND OUTER LANDSCAPES:

ECOCENTRIC TRANSCENDENCE:

Group 1: (pp. 230-235)

1st Stage

1. Describe how the narrator arrives at the woods? What is the effect of this means of transportation upon his experience? (233)

2. How do the “tentativeness” and “insignificance” of the camp sight contribute to his mood? (235)

3. How do thoughts of the lives of former men who lived on this land and who now “haunt” it contribute to the speaker’s feelings? (232-233)

4. In summary, develop why a “heavy feeling of melancholy and loneliness” overcomes the narrator during this first night in the woods?

Group 2: (pp.235-237)

2nd Stage

1. Explain how narrator feels about realizing “nobody knows where (he is)” and “(he) doesn’t know what is happening to anybody else in the world.” (235)

2. Explain how narrator feels about his recognition of “a mysterious wilderness, mostly unknowable and mostly alien...in which the power and the knowledge of men count for nothing.” (235)

3. Explain how the narrator feels about his realization that “he will not speak and will have no reason or need for speech.” (235) How is language a barrier to the natural experience?

4. How does the narrator’s realization that the “wilderness is beautiful, dangerous, abundant, oblivious of us, mysterious, never to be conquered or controlled or second-guessed, or known more than a little” contribute to his ability to overcome his anthropocentric perspective? (Berry 236).

5. The narrator sees that “all wildernesses are one” and that the natural world does not follow human time. Explain how this new perspective of space and time contribute to the narrator’s “entrance to the woods.”

6. How is entering into the woods “a kind of death?” (237) List the things he has left behind.

Group 3: (237-240)

3rd Stage

1. Explain the narrator’s feelings about the realization that “the continent is covered by an ocean of engine noise, in which silences occur only sporadically and at wide intervals.” (239)

2. Explain how this sentence summarizes the current state of man’s relationship with the environment: “The machine is running now with a speed that produces blindness-and the blindness of a thing with power promises the destruction of” what cannot be seen.” (240)

3. Describe the narrator’s outlook on humanity as he develops an “awareness that this (wilderness) is an island surrounded by the machinery and the workings of an insane greed, hungering for the world’s end...” (240)

4. Summarize the characteristics of this third stage in the narrator’s “entrance to the woods.”

Group 4:

4th Stage: (241-244)

1. Explain the significance of the narrator’s realization that “(he) moves without the help or interference of any machine...without reference to anything except the lay of the land and the capabilities of my own body.” (241)

2. Explain how Wendell Berry’s transcendent moment “I am reduced to my irreducible self. I feel the lightness of body that a man must feel who has just lost fifty pounds of fat...I am aware that I move in the landscape as one of its details” develops his ecocentric perspective: (241)

3. Define “the confluence between inner and out landscapes” by using the following quote: “Slowly my mind and my nerves have slowed to a walk. The quiet of the woods has ceased to be something that I observe; now it is something that I am a part of. I have joined it with my own quiet...” (243)

4. Summarize the characteristics of this fourth and final stage in the narrator’s “entrance to the woods.”