Don Berry
Primarily known for his historical novels of early Oregon country -- Trask, Moontrap, and To Build a Ship -- Don Berry lived and worked from 1974 until his death in 2001 as a writer, painter, musician, sculptor, instrument maker, poet, and Zen practitioner on Vashon Island, in Seattle, and at Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island. He ventured into educational software in the pioneering days of computers, authored scripts for adventure films, wrote commissioned books, and built a website called Berryworks for his own unpublished fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and philosophy. Berry developed his writing skills with science fiction stories in the 1950s, but it is his trilogy of novels and his non-fiction history A Majority of Scoundrels (all written and published between 1960 and 1963) for which he is best remembered. With them, he helped create a new Northwest fiction style. Journalist Jeff Baker has called him "Reed's Forgotten Beat" for his work, his practice of Eastern metaphysics, and his longtime friendship with poets Gary Snyder (b. 1930) and Philip Whalen (1923-2002), an association that began at Reed College in Portland in the 1950s. Berry's novels, and Scoundrels, were republished between 2004 and 2006 by Oregon State University Press.
“He saw a world he had not seen before; a world made not for mastery but for living. Once seen it was a very simple thing to understand. The wonder was that he had been so blind.”
“All his life had been based on this hostile kind of strength; a strength that viewed the world as a thing to master, to overcome, to fight. As a problem that might be solved by destroying. It seemed faintly ridiculous to him now; and he found it difficult to remember that a life could be based on such fear. There could, he thought , be no impulse to destruction that was not rooted in some terrible fear, and he was no longer afraid.”
“This tree wishes you no harm. God around it in peace. You are hurting yourself......The traveling was a little easier after that, knowing it was not necessary to destroy each tree that blocked him.”
“In time he found that all his perceptions were subject to the same easy control”
“If he could just get rid of the harsh irritation of his conscious thinking, then he would be all right; then he would be at peace”
“There was no good or bad connected with anything any more.......He regretted nothing; wanted nothing. He was simply existing, and the way things were was the way they had always been and always would be. He didn't care any more. He did what had to be done, and endured in a timeless present, without past or future.”
“Now it occurred to him the changes of mental state that might be important were just such minor things as this abnormal irritability. Not so dramatic as visions and fevers, maybe. But important. An attitude of carelessness, or annoyance, clouded your judgment, and that was not a good thing in the woods.”
“The whites do not believe in such things," Charley said."Believe?" Tupshin was bewildered. "What is this talk of belief? Do they not believe in the sea, then? Or the mountains? There is a thing which is, it is not for believing or not believing.”
“A black bird of guilt hovers over the death of a man, waiting to perch where it may find room in the minds that remain. It is an easy thing to be deceived by the happenings of the world into believing you are responsible for them. It is part of man's great conceit that he can believe himself responsible for the universe and its actions. It is a part of his conceit that he can believe himself guilty of the death of every other man, and take the guilt of the world on himself. But there is no guilt to be taken. it is not necessary that the responsibility be assigned. It is not the concern of those who remain, but a thing between the world and the one who is dead. that which was, is not. It is a simple thing.”
“The absolute negative, the ultimate saying of no to the world, when it is just too late. And always the subtle conviction that if you had said No a moment earlier, it would none of it have happened. But the saying of no comes too late by a little. You are always a little too late in saying it.”