Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Note. Other anglosaxon monosyllables are god, love, loyalty, honor, beauty, duty, integrity, art, artist, religion, truth, science, poetry, culture, fascism, communism, dialectical-materialism, fellow-traveler, anarchist, philosophical-anarchist, marx, freud, semantic, loyalist franco, hider, duce, committee, friend, enemy, state, totalitarian state, mental state, statement, education, student, teacher, maestro, woman, man, Woman, Man, humanity, kidnap, vigilante, sex fiend, perversion, normal, genius, guarantee, peaceful-picketing, collective-bargaining, Negro, negro, Jew, jew, dinge, jig, boog, colored, jigaboo, nigger, darky, spade, eph, shine, smoke, hebe, kike, sheeny, eskimo, jewish, jow, joosh, anti-semitic, swing, cat, alligator, gator, icky, wacky, lick, hotlick, gutbucket, barrelhouse, bennygoodman, plumbing, stick, tea, lush, godbox, jitterbug, tong, goddam, god damn, god damned, swell, oke, okay, lousy, superb, good, excellent, fine, nice, magnificent, bravo, bis, pooch, virgin, frigid, wife, husband, prick, pricque, box, bubs, jamsession, jive, silicosis, syphilis, wasserman, sex, sexual, sexuality, homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, fairy, pansy, flit, headleigh, swish, les, lesbie, lesbian, labor, laborite, writer, author, musician, composer, workshop, studio, den, stuff, shot, pic, pix, angle, contact, leica, candid, Life, margaret bourke-white, maggie berkwitz, surrealism, photography, photographer, documentary, work, van gogh, dali, picasso, shakespeare, critic, reviewer, authority, book, publisher, gallery, show, theater, exhibition, stage, drama, tragedy, satire, sincerity, trotskyite, The Old Man, stalinist, liberal, minicam, henchman, the cape, the vineyard, flying, motoring, bathe, cue, revival, luntnfontanne, group theater, group, group consciousness, movement, john-ford, walt-disney, the dance, balletomane, leftist, editor, cub, hack, shop, inhibition, complex, regionalism, nationalism, jingoism, patriotism, americanism, altruism, schism, jizzum, hizzun, malnutrition, pare-lorentz, capital, thurman-arnold, veblen, mysticism, intellectual, emotional outlet, escapism, ideology, business, big business, big operator, layout, setup, pushover, scientist, scientific, medical, surgical, visceral, fiddle, prostie, frank, honest, incest, sponsor, cinematic, film, movie, talkie, moom pitcher, genitalia, parts, privates, idealist, psychotic, psychic, psyche, psychoanalysis, neothomist, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, intuitive, esp, stooge, gross, clear, cleaned, communication, literature, understand, howdoyoufeelnow, sympathy, sympathizer, galleys, machine, laugh, sadisticanal, balls, nuts, nerts, bastid, taste, serve, deserve, fault, father, mother, dad, mummy, mumsy, mumpsypum, daddy, daddyboy, chickabiddy, comfy, cute, satisfactory, congratulations, congratters, sexual intercourse, fearful, dreadful, awful, godawful, nasty, nastiness, snotty, ghastly, great, greatness, greatest, best, worst, splendid, i mean, on the other hand, that is, for pete’s sake, qxr, capehart, disk, disque, album, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus H. Christ, Jeez, jeez fellas, jeez fellas, The Nazarene, The Nazarene Carpenter, The Galilean, Our Lord, Our Savior, Christ, christ, kee-rist, crissake, gawd, sacrosanct, sacrament, sacrilege, development, health, mental health, decadent, depravity, amoral, amorist, unethical, act of kind, coitus, relations, been with, live with, sleep with, mistress, lover, pubes, curse, fall off the roof, flagging, courses, unwell, period, friend, art treasure, American, democracy, munich betrayal, rape-of-czechoslovakia, battle-of-britain, determinism, guy, gal, person, class-consciousness, early-chaplin, late-beethoven, early-steinbeck, orson-welles, tom-wolfe, toscanini, fifth-column, reactionary, demagogue, blitzkrieg, defense.

  5.

  The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

  The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

  Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

  Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.

  The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

  The weak in courage are strong in cunning.

  Listen to the fool’s reproach; it is a kingly tide.

  The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.

  You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

  The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains are in truth the causes of its life and the sources of all activity, but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage are strong in cunning.

  Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring. To the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.

  But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights.

  Some will say, Is not God alone the Prolific? I answer, God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men.

  These two classes of men are always upon earth, and they should be enemies. Whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.

  If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

  Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

  One thought fills immensity.

  Mutual forgiveness of each vice,

  Such are the gates of Paradise.

  Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

  Everything that is is holy.

  (On the Porch: 3

  (On the Porch: 3

  From these woods a good way out along the hill there now came a sound that was new to us.

  All the darkness in near range of the earth as far as we were able to hear was strung with noises that were all one noise, and to this we had become so accustomed that this new sound came out of silence, and left an even more powerful silence behind it, so that with each return it, and the ensuing silence, gave each other more and more value, like the exchanges of two mirrors laid face to face.

  Whereas we had been silent before, this sound immediately stiffened us into much more intense silence. Without exchange of word or glance we each received communication of a new opening of delight: but chiefly we now engaged in mutual listening and in analysis of what we heard, so strongly, that in all the body and in the whole range of mind and memory, each of us became all one hollowed and listening ear.

  It was perhaps most nearly like the noise hydrogen makes when a match flame is passed across the mouth of a slanted test-tube. It was about the same height as this sound: soprano, with a strong alto illusion. It was colder than this sound, though: as cold and as chilling as the pupil of a goat’s eye, or a low note on the clarinet It ran eight identical notes to a call or stanza, a little faster than allegretto, in this rhythm and accent:

  - - - - : - - : - - :

  Every note was sharply, dryly, and cleanly accented, just short of staccato; and each was driven out with such strictness and restraint that there was in the short silence between each note an extreme tightness and mutual, organically shared tension. Each of the first seven notes was given exactly the same force; the seventh, hit harder, splayed open a fraction, and out of two things, the extra, hammer hardness it was hit with, and a barely discernible trailing-down at its end, gave the illusion of being a higher note.

  This sound, then, started up, with great dramatic suddenness, at some indeterminable distance from us, a distance which in time became a little more determinable, though it was never at all possible accurately to locate it; for the ear always needs the help of the eye. It was from somewhere in the woods out to the left of the house at the bottom of our hill; and a little later it became clear that it was not in the low woods, but somewhere up the opposite slope; and after a little we got it in range within say twenty degrees of the ninety on the horizontal circle which at first it could have occupied any part of. It became clear that it would be between an eighth and a quarter mile away; and this became remarkable to us because at that considerable distance we could nevertheless hear, or rather by some equivalent to radioactivity stron
gly feel, the motions and tensions of the throat and body, the very tilt of the head, that discharged it.

  Soon we were helped in locating it (as a second point in any geometry always is helpful, whereas one point alone can run you crazy) by the opening-up of a second call. This call was identical with the first but, coming from a good deal farther away, seemed higher, hollower, and thinner: scarcely more, yet very definitely more, than a loud clear echo.

  Which of these calls seemed the more mysterious, it is not possible to say. Their quality was very different by virtue both of their difference in distance and of a distinct though indefinable difference in the personality of the callers. At one moment the more distant call was more exciting simply in its distance and because, by its secondary appearance and by its distance beyond the first caller in relation to us, we got the illusion that it was the thing sought by the other; the next, the nearer call took all the honors from it, by nearness; by having become the searcher with whom we had identified ourselves and taken sides and by having yet at the same time remained so entirely itself, without regard for us, no part of us, more alien to us, because it was alive and conscious and within our near perspective of kinship, than any stone or star. The fact is of course that these two series of calls, when they had been set going, enhanced each other quite as richly as each enhanced and received enhancement from its own, and the other’s, interventions of silence, and a little later from its participation in, yet aristocratic distinction from, that plebeian, unanimous ringing of the air which had at no time ceased or diminished and which, now that we were listening so intently, became once more a part of the reality of hearing.

  By use only of silences, without changing their stanzaic structure, these two calls went through any number of rhythmic-dramatic devices of delays in question and answer, of overlappings, of tricks of delay by which each pretended to show that it had signed off for the night or, actually, that it no longer even existed. There is an old, not specially funny vaudeville act in which the whole troupe builds up and burlesques a dramatic situation simply by different vocal and gesticulative colorations of the word ‘you.’ I thought of that now: but its present use was any amount better because the artists were subtler and what they had to say was more enigmatic and more exciting to the audience. Neither of them changed a note or a beat of his call; and if either allowed himself any change of tone or color whatever, it was so delicate that it is impossible to assign it to the callers save through the changefulness and human sentimentality of us who were listening and making what we could of it But certainly, one way or the other, its meanings changed. One time it would be sexual; another, just a casual colloquy; another, a challenge; another, a signal or warning; another, a comment on us; another, some simple and desperate effort at mutual location; another, most intense and masterful irony; another, laughter; another, triumph; another, a masterpiece of parody of any one, any combination, or all of these assigned or implicit tones: but at all times it was beyond even the illusion of full apprehension, and was noble, frightening and distinguished: a work of great, private and unambitious art which was irrelevant to audience.

  We were trying hardest of all to make out what animal or bird was making these sounds, but we had no clue, no anchorage in knowledge through whose help we might by comparative projections have taken it. I cannot even try to say how in the long run we concluded (perhaps in part through its sharpness, tightness out of the throat, and carnivorous timbre) that it was the voice of a fur-bearing animal and that the animal was on the small side and that he might most likely, then that he must, be a fox. It is this sort of mystery we should run against in all casual experience if we found ourselves without warning possessed of a new sense.

  Now this is one of a universe of things which should be accepted and recorded for its own sake. The first entrance of this call was as perfect a piece of dramatic or musical structure as I know of: the context perfectly prepared, the entrance of the mysterious principal completely unforeseen yet completely casual, with none of the quality of studiousness in its surprise which hurts for instance some of the music of Brahms; and from its first entrance on, the whole world was frozen and fixed under its will as by the introduction of a precipitant; so that the identical entrance of the second voice carried with it an excitement almost beyond what is possible to bear.

  When this second voice had spoken, the first did not answer, but froze just as we and our world had frozen. That which had called was listening intently too. And that which had called the caller was waiting and listening. And now after a long space of more and more tremendous silence (into which there arose, but very faintly, loosely, as natural and common as dew, the ramified ringing of frogs, insects, and night birds), after this long space of silence had extended itself beyond any degree of natural endurance, the second voice spoke a second time, identically, yet, because of the silence, the lack of answer, more imperious-sounding than at first. Then there was a wait, in whose first part the call repeated itself on the ear’s memory silently yet keenly as print, and in whose latter expansion once again we were intense with waiting; and then, by some rhythmic genius a little, but only a very little, off-beat, off the beat of eccentrics our ear had of the sum of the calls computed, a very little before it was quite possible to expect it, there came the voice of the first creature; and it was with the breaking open of this voice that we too broke open, silently, our whole bodies broke open into a laughter that destroyed and restored us more even than the most absolute weeping ever can. This is a laughter I have experienced only rarely: listening to the genius of Mozart at its angriest and cleanest, most masculine fire; the sudden memory of some line of Shakespeare, ‘Nymph, in thine orisons be all my sins remembered’; walking in streets or driving in country; watching negroes; or in that delicate stage of love when a girl, serious and scarcely tinged with smiling, her eyes muted and her head poised most immaculately, first begins, not in pleasure alone, but in a kind of fear and deep gentleness, to use her light, slow, frank hands upon your head and body: a phase so unassailably beyond any meaning of tenderness and of trust, so like the opening of first living upon the shining of the young earth in its first morning, that an overwhelming knowledge of God and of his non-existence fight in you and, all in this same quietness, you feel it impossible that you can look into her eyes one more moment and not be so distended by incredulous joy that you are of one size and ignorance and fleshlessness with space itself.*

  And this phase of love, to anyone who holds love in the utmost esteem that is its due, must be beyond all comparison the cruelest and bitterest thing in human experience. Even within its own moments it draws you both irresistibly into those desperate battlings of the body which only in their first few seconds seem the greater joy they are not, and which so soon blunt and blind the delicate munificence of your exchange into their own beautiful but violent, charcoal-drawn terms. Out of this violence of flesh and of total mutual confidence it is not possible many times to withdraw into that quieter sphere of apposition in which the body, brain and spirit of each of you is all one perfectly focused lens and in which these two lenses devour, feed, enrich and honor each other, it is not possible because the violence blurs, feathers and distorts the essential constituency of the lens. And it is then, living in flushes of memory of a thing more excellent than you may much, hope to share between you again, that with scarcely conscious bravery and sorrow, and with measureless compassion, love must assume itself to be established and alive between you. There will be goodness and joy between you again, with wisdom and luck a great deal, more than enough, but not all the kind regard nor all the love within the scope of existence will ever restore you what for a while, and only that you might lose it in the blind service of nature, you had.

  In the sound of these foxes, if they were foxes, there was nearly as much joy, and less grief. There was the frightening joy of hearing the world talk to itself, and the grief of incommunicability. In that grief I am now as then, with the small yet absolute comfort of kno
wing that communication of such a thing is not only beyond possibility but irrelevant to it; whereas in love, where we find ourselves so completely involved, so completely responsible and so apparently capable, and where all our soul so runs out to the loveliness, strength, and defenseless mortality, plain, common, salt and muscled toughness of human existence of a girl* that the desire to die for her seems the puniest and stingiest expression of your regard which you can, like a proud tomcat with a slain fledgling, lay at her feet; in love the restraint in focus and the arrest and perpetuation of joy seems entirely possible and simple, and its failure inexcusable, even while we know it is beyond the power of all biology and even while, like the fading of flowerlike wonder out of a breast to which we are becoming habituated, that exquisite joy lies, fainting through change upon change, in the less and less prescient palm of the less and less godlike, more and more steadily stupefied, human, ordinary hand.

  And so though this incident of the calling of two creatures should by rights be established at very least as a poem, or a piece of music, and though, even, I know that a more gifted human being, and even I myself, could come nearer giving it, I do not relinquish the ultimately hopeless effort with entire grief simply because that effort would be, above most efforts, so useless.