Let Us Now Praise Famous Man

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was hailed as one of the most influential books, especially in journalistic innovation. I will have to agree that his point of view, style, and content is unlike anything I have read. He describes his awareness of his own perspective in reporting, and how his own presence changes the lives he's reporting on. His solution includes describing his surroundings in literary 4-D. This can be in turns excruciating and enlightening. It is remarkable how much one can understand and know about someone simply by examining the minutia in their lives (down to the color of dust in the bottom of a trunk). Perhaps my favorite paragraph explains that the memory the mother has of quitting school because her dress is unfashionable and sneered at, is actually the experience of the daughter. Some may think that the practicalities of living hand to mouth would drive cares of trying to fit in, or caring about social embarrassment aside, but the fact that the mother took her daughter's shame so deeply she remembered it as her own, was heartbreaking. Yes, there is a lot of detail to wade in, but it is the gems like these that make these dust motes shimmer. (Also, the e-copy I had had SO many typos, it was distracting, and sometimes hard to decipher!).

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whole blind earth dispread: they chainlike stream like water violins, a straight and upward rain extracted from the world: yet they are in this hour so profoundly retired upon themselves, they are scarcely the echo of an echo, music’s remembrance in a dying dream, lashed through with weltering whippoorwill, the mourner and genius of great summer night:

if these seem lists and inventories merely, things dead unto themselves, devoid of mutual magnetisms, and if they sink, lose impetus, meter, intension, then bear in mind at least my wish, and perceive in them and restore them what strength you can of yourself: for I must say to you, this is not a work of art or of entertainment, nor will I assume the obligations of the artist or entertainer, but is a human effort which must require human co-operation.

let this be borne in mind, in order that, when we descend among its windings and blockades, into examination of slender particulars, this its wholeness and simultaneous living map may not be neglected, however lost the breadth of the country may be in the winding walk of each sentence.

other times the bed, neatly made though it is, looks like an unlucky cake.

Words cannot embody; they can only describe. But a certain kind of artist, whom we will distinguish from others as a poet rather than a prose writer, despises this fact about words or his medium, and continually brings words as near as he can to an illusion of embodiment In doing so he accepts a falsehood but makes, of a sort in any case, better art.

the most dangerous form of pride is neither arrogance nor humility, but its mild, common denominator form, complacency.

In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again:

towards the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of error, and of God.

‘Education’ as it stands is tied in with every bondage I can conceive of, and is the chief cause of these bondages, including acceptance and respect, which are the worst bondages of all.

But so are resourcefulness against deceit and against strangling: and so are pleasure, and joy, and love: and a human being who is deprived of these and of this consciousness is deprived almost of existence itself.

peanut plants twittering as under the scathe of machine-gun fire,

you know well enough how cleansed, and glad, and in what appearance of health and peace, every twig and leaf and all the shape of a country shine in such a light, and can fill you with love which has no traceable basis:

for the ear always needs the help of the eye.