Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Judgement: Though I do on the one hand seriously believe that the universe can be seen in a grain of sand and that that is as good a lens as any other and a much more practicable one than the universe, I am again not trying any such job here. On too many other counts I simply do not think the experience was important* enough to justify any such effort; and I will consistently hope to keep the effort and method in strict proportion to my own limited judgement of the importance of the experience as a whole and in its parts.

  The plain desire or whim must then be self-evident: all I want to do is tell this as exactly and clearly as I can and get the damned thing done with.† I would again be false to the truth if I were false to that.

  Very roughly I know that to get my own sort of truth out of the experience I must handle it from four planes:

  That of recall; of reception, contemplation, in medias res: for which I have set up this silence under darkness on this front porch as a sort of fore-stage to which from time to time the action may have occasion to return.*

  ‘As it happened’: the straight narrative at the prow as from the first to last day it cut unknown water.

  By recall and memory from the present: which is a part of the experience: and this includes imagination, which in the other planes I swear myself against.

  As I try to write it: problems of recording; which, too, are an organic part of the experience as a whole.

  These are, obviously, in strong conflict. So is any piece of human experience. So, then, inevitably, is any even partially accurate attempt to give any experience as a whole.

  It seems likely at this stage that the truest way to treat a piece of the past is as such: as if it were no longer the present. In other words, the ‘truest’ thing about the experience is now neither that it was from hour to hour thus and so; nor is it my fairly accurate ‘memory’ of how it was from hour to hour in chronological progression; but is rather as it turns up in recall, in no such order, casting its lights and associations forward and backward upon the then past and the then future, across that expanse of experience.†

  If this is so the book as a whole will have a form and set of tones rather less like those of narrative than like those of music.‡

  That suits me, and I hope it turns out to be so.

  From the amount I am talking about ‘this experience’ you may have got the idea I think it was of some egregious importance. In that case you will be cheated in proportion to your misapprehension. This ‘experience’ was just a series of various, fairly complicated, and to me interesting, things which I perceived or which happened to me last* summer, that’s all. Greater and less things have happened, even to me. And I keep talking so much about it simply because I am respectful of experience in general and of any experience whatever, and because it turns out that going through, remembering, and trying to tell of anything is of itself (not because the Experience was either hot or cold, but of itself, and as a part of the experience) interesting and important to me: and because, as I have said before, I am interested in the actual and in telling of it, and so would wish to make clear that nothing here is invented. The whole job may well seem messy to you. But a part of my point is that experience offers itself in richness and variety and in many more terms than one and that it may therefore be wise to record it no less variously. Much of the time I shall want to tell of particulars very simply, in their own terms: but from any set of particulars it is possible and perhaps useful to generalize. In any case I am the sort of person who generalizes: and if for your own convenience and mine I left that out, I would be faking and artifacting right from the start.

  I think there is at the middle of this sense of the importance and dignity of actuality and the attempt to reproduce and analyze the actual, and at the middle of this antagonism toward art something of real importance which is by no means my discovery, far less my private discovery, but which is a sense of ‘reality’ and of ‘values’ held by more and more people, and the beginnings of somewhat new forms of, call it art if you must, of which the still and moving cameras are the strongest instruments and symbols. It would be an art and a way of seeing existence based, let us say, on an intersection of astronomical physics, geology, biology, and (including psychology) anthropology, known and spoken of not in scientific but in human terms. Nothing that springs from this intersection can conceivably be insignificant: everything is most significant in proportion as it approaches in our perception, simultaneously, its own singular terms and its ramified kinship and probable hidden identification with everything else.

  Along the lines of this possible ‘art’ and attitude toward existence, nothing that follows* can pretend to be anything more advanced than a series of careful but tentative, rudely experimental, and fragmentary renderings of some of the salient aspects of a real experience seen and remembered in its own terms.

  But if that is of any interest to you whatever, it is important that you should so far as possible forget that this is a book That you should know, in other words, that it has no part in that realm where disbelief is habitually suspended. It is much simpler than that It is simply an effort to use words in such a way that they will tell as much as I want to and can make them tell of a thing which happened and which, of course, you have no other way of knowing. It is in some degree worth your knowing what you can of not because you have any interest in me but simply as the small part it is of human experience in general.

  It is one way of telling the truth: the only possible way of telling the kind of truth I am here most interested to tell.

  Much of this land that lay out around us had been taken over by human beings, who were under and who will perhaps always remain under the infantile delusion that they own it.

  But now, in the short yet extreme winter of that shadow of itself through which a continuous half of the earth twists its surface, this fragile and shallow colonization was reduced to its least the few chilled embers which cities, thanks to their intense concentration of life, man age steadily fainting to sustain clear into the relief of daybreak, and, on the face of the open earth, only the infinitesimal and starlike infrequent glints of sickness here, death and love there. All normal human life was drained away; all creatures of the day time, under the passage and influence of that shadow, were shriveled as unanimously into sleep as when, in the leaning of the northern tracts of the globe away from the sun, all vegetable nature faints like the fading of a blush, the bees are stunned, and on the cold air in glittering swarms the tribal birds drain southward. This whole area of the planet itself, quite as literally as a weary human head, was loosened on its neck, was nodded and yielded over to the profound influences and memories, unknown to its sun-blind daytime, of its early childhood, before man became a part of its experience. The blind land itself and the blind water, the sky and the dove-light bombardment of its stars, the air, the shadow, the swarming, sleeping civilizations of the vegetable earth, certain frail insects, certain reptiles, birds, and fur-bearing personalities whose sleep is by day and whose business is dark, these were in complete self-possession. They did not even so much as tolerate the great hypnotized existence, the suspended animation, of human life; they simply ignored it, quite as an ocean is casual of the less than toylike traffic upon it.

  I know of course: they ignored it no less in the daylight. I know of course: that whatever triumph I smelled, felt, heard in their presence, and whatever fear, was a merely human, merely personal matter. We bask in our lavish little sun as children in the protective sphere of their parents: and perhaps can never outgrow, or can never dare afford to outgrow, our delusions of his strength and wisdom and of our intelligence, competence and safety; and we carry over from him, like a green glow in the eyeballs, these daytime delusions, so inescapably that we can not only never detach ourselves from the earth, even in the perception of our minds, but cannot even face the fact of nature without either stone blindness or sentimentality: and we cannot bear, for any length of time, to carry in our minds in any literalness the fact o
f our small size and our youth. If this were merely the domestic and per-sonal matter of a father or mother fixation, we would take it very seriously and those of us who could afford it would spend the next two years talking about ourselves in a shaded room.* It is much more serious than that: it affects the deepest feelings and actions of a whole race at the very roots; and beyond a couple of psalms and a few almost accidental artistic trills and semiquavers, what thought have we taken for it: for that basis of our existence which is even simpler and even more literal than the need to eat and sleep.

  We have known, or have been told that we know, for some centuries now that the sun does not ‘set’ or ‘rise’: the earth twists its surface into and out of the light of the sun.

  How many poets have become so aware of this fact that it is natural to them to use it.

  In its twisting the earth also cradles back and forth, somewhat like a bobbin, and leans through a very slightly eccentric course, and it is this retirement out of and a return into a certain proximity to the sun which causes the change of seasons. As Canada is retired out of summer, the Argentine is restored into summer, as simultaneously, as literally, as the edge of night is balanced by the edge of day, midnight by noon. Just how much poetry, or art, or plain human consciousness, has taken this into account. You have only to look at all the autumn art about death and at all the spring art about life to get an idea: we are so blindfold by local fact that we cannot even imagine this simultaneity. It is comfortable, and to quite some extent natural, and no doubt to some extent wise, to be local: and yet in for instance politics we flatter ourselves we are outgrowing it.

  No doubt we are sensible in giving names to places: Canada; the Argentine. But we would also be sensible to remember that the land we have given these names to, and all but the relatively very small human population, wear these names lightly.

  No doubt we have the ‘right’ to own and use the earth as seems to us best if we can: but we might be thought to qualify a little better for the job if it ever occurred to us in the least to qualify or question that right.

  Even what seem to us our present soundest and most final ideas of justice are noticeably cavalier and provincial and self-centered. What would we have to think of hogs who, having managed to secure justice among themselves, still and continuously and without the undertone of a thought to the contrary exploited every other creature and material of the planet, and who wore in their eyes, perfectly undisturbed by any second consideration, the high and holy light of science or religion.

  Sure, these things are simple: so simple, God forbid, that they sound merely whimsical. They are, though, literal facts. Our carelessness of them is literal fact. Any child should be able to grasp them. To grasp such facts, to try to understand them and their application, would seem as primal and as relevant to and influential upon the rest of what we are and do as breathing. Our own inability to grasp them or our negligence, which amounts to the same thing, does not qualify us very highly to handle more difficult facts which are of central importance at very least (to remain provincial) to the good of the human race.

  I am a Communist by sympathy and conviction.* But it does not appear (just for one thing) that Communists have recognized or in any case made anything serious of the sure fact that the persistence of what once was insufficiently described as Pride, a mortal sin, can quite as coldly and inevitably damage and wreck the human race as the most total power of ‘Greed’ ever could: and that socially anyhow, the most dangerous form of pride is neither arrogance nor humility, but its mild, common denominator form, complacency.

  I am under no delusion that communism can be achieved overnight, if ever; and one’s flexibility or patience toward what seem obvious occasions of mishandling should be* as considerable as one’s strictness and fearlessness in facing what seem to be the facts of those failures. The fact remains that artists, for instance, should be capable of figuring the situation out to the degree that they would refuse the social eminence and the high pay they are given in Soviet Russia. The setting up of an aristocracy of superior workers is no good sign, either. Certainly, beyond denial, we, human beings, at our best are scarcely entered into the post-diaper stage of our development, and it is common sense to treat us as what we are, and would be as harmful and criminal as it would be foolish to treat ourselves as what we aren’t. But it would be bright if the treatment caused us consistently to reach out and grow: you don’t clamber out of infantilism by retreating, or staying, or being ordered to retreat, into what any average fool can see is the bedwetting stage.

  Certainly we don’t know now, and never will, all of even the human truth. But we may as well admit we know a few things, and take full advantage of them. It is probably never really wise, or even necessary, or anything better than harmful, to educate a human being toward a good end by telling him lies.

  A couple of hundred yards away I was aware, not by sound but by thinking of it, of the creek bending in the bushes.

  We knew this creek a mile away, where it crossed under the highway, and a few yards of it down here near the house. Aside from that we knew nothing of it; it lay only very lightly across our experience and we knew its beginning and course and ending only in a generalized way, a beginning in the sprouting of cold springs, a wandering of the land in sensitive forms, an ending, or a change, at that unknown place where at length it continuously smiled into some stronger stream. These things we knew in imagination and yet could be sure of, but much differently and more clearly, as if it stood in the warm light of a searchlight beam, we knew of our own part of the creek: the quiet noises and the noiselessnesses with which the burden of its smooth and brown heavy water lay along the flat stones, the sudden deeps, the submerged stumps and the sand and the clay of its padently fretted trough. The surface of a continent, condensed here and there by chance into the serious infant frowning of mountain systems, is drawn away by the action of water into an enormous and unnaturally slender vine. This vine takes growth not by the radiant outward energy which compels a branched tree to burst still further into branches but always by a sinking away of its energy toward the center, as leaves are drawn into the wake of an auto, or as if a tree should, through the energetic contraction of its sap in autumn, still further pierce the air. As by benefit of that sped-up use of the moving camera through which it is possible to see the act of growth continuous from seed through the falling of the flower, so we may see in five minutes’ time the branchings and search-ings and innumerable growth of a river system, like a vine feeling out and finding its footholds on a wall, or like those subtlest of all chances which out of the very composture of an acorn ordain upon the growing action of branches in unresisting air certain shapes and not others: this eternal, lithe, fingering, chiseling, searching out the tender groin of the land that the water in a river system is carrying on in ten million parts of a face of earth at once, so that in the least creasing of the land sucked into scars between two stalks of corn you are seeing an organic part of the great body of the Mississippi River. There is no need to personify a river: it is much too literally alive in its own way, and like air and earth themselves is a creature much more powerful, much more basic, than any living thing the earth has borne. It is one of those few, huge, casual and aloof creatures by the mercy of whose existence our own existence was made possible; and at very least as much as it is good to hear the whining of dynamos, the artifacted hearts of our civilization, it is well to hear, to become aware of, the operations of water among whose spider lacings by chance we live: and above all it is well to know of it as nearly as possible in its own terms, wherein the crop it brings up, the destruction it is capable of, the dams and the helmeted brains of generators thrown across it and taking a half-hitch on its personal energy, are small, irrelevant, not even noticed incidents in its more serious career, which is by a continual sagging in all parts of its immense branched vine and by a continual searching out of weakness, the ironing flat and reduction to dead sea level of the wrinkled fabric of the earth.
How beautifully then it has drawn our country into pleated valleys, in what language it has written upon the genius forehead of the earth the name and destiny of water, how handsome are the meanderings of its dotage through yellow flats across which is seen in the hard sunlight the broken and glass glistering of a city, are matters less truly important than the wrinkling open of a gully in a cornfield, the cellophane crackle of cold mountain branches, the twinkling spiral of sand that stands out of the heart of a spring, the sleeping and high-breasted sliding along of a milewide river, the great, final, digressive rectal discharge which beneath New Orleans yellows the Mexican Gulf: and the knowledge that such actions, going on intimately in every yard of thousands of miles of land beneath the hoverings and discharges of the sky, are all of one thing, one more than beast.

  It was good to be doing the work we had come to do and to be seeing the things we cared most to see, and to be among the people we cared most to know, and to know these things not as a book looked into, a desk sat down to, a good show caught, but as a fact as large as the air; something absolute and true we were a part of and drew with every breath, and added to with every glance of the eye. It was good even, to be doing the limited job we had been assigned. We lay thinking of the unprecedented and unrecorded beauty, and sorrow and honor in the existence of, a child who lay sleeping in the room not far from us, and of the family up the road, and of the other family that lived near them, and remembering hours that were still hardly different from the knowledge of the present, and all the things seen and known and wondered over in those hours.

  Out in front of the house the ground was tough, and knotty with thin weeds, in a bulge. Rains had taken its slopings-away violently to pieces. After the series of tricks had been learned, the road as far in as the house was a little more than barely passable in good weather, and gave one the pleasure of any newfound skill. Beyond the house it was a hundred yards of falling ditch full of hunched and convulsed muscles of clay whose levels varied suddenly three and five feet This ditch fell along the side of the cornfield and flattened abruptly into sand as it lay into the woods. They stood up all along the creek and on the low hill on the far side and swung out deep in front of the house at the far side of another corn patch. From these woods a good way out along the hill there now came a sound that was new to us.