Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

James Agee
Walker Evans

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it; and the question, Why we make this book, and set it at large, and by what right, and for what purpose, and to what good end, or none:

that these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of still others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated toward this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.

All over Alabama, the lamps are out. Every leaf drenches the touch; the spider's net is heavy. The roads lie there, with nothing to use them. The fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast. The plow handles are wet, and the rails and frogplates and the weeds between the ties: and not even the hurryings and hoarse sorrows of a distant train, on other roads, is heard. The little towns, the county seats, house by house white-painted and elaborately sawn among their heavy and dark-lighted leaves, in the spaced protections of their mineral light they stand so prim, so voided, so undefended upon starlight, that it is inconceivable to despise or to scorn a white man, an owner of land; even in Birmingham, mile on mile, save for the sudden frightful streaming, almost instantly diminished and silent of a closed black car, and save stone lonesome sinister heelbeats, that show never a face and enter, soon, a frame door flush with the pavement, and ascend the immediate lightless staircase, mile on mile, stone, stone, smooth charted streams of stone, the streets under their lifted lamps lie void before eternity.

This family must take care of itself; it has no mother or father: there is no other shelter, nor resource, nor any love, interest, sustaining strength or comfort, so near, nor can anything happy or sorrowful that comes to anyone in this family possibly mean to those outside it what it means to those within it: but it is, as I have told, inconceivably lonely, drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn round a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely, nor any less without help or comfort, and is likewise drawn in upon itself.

The furniture in general and the eating implements are all at or very near the bottom of their scale: broken, insecure, uncomfortable, ill-smelling, all that a man without money must constantly accept, when he can get it, and be glad of, or make do. Since I have talked of 'esthetics' the least I can do is to add a note on it in their terms: they live in a steady shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities, piecing these together into whatever semblance of comfortable living they can, and the whole of it is a stark nakedness of makeshifts and the lack of means: yet they are also, of course, profoundly anesthetized.

For that reason and for others, I would do just as badly to simplify or eliminate myself from this picture as to simplify or invent character, places or atmospheres. A chain of truths did actually weave itself and run through: it is their texture that I want to represent, not betray, nor pretty up into art. The one deeply exciting thing to me about Gudger is that he is actual, he is living, at this instant. He is not some artist's or journalist's or propagandist's invention: he is a human being: and to what degree I am able it is my business to reproduce him as the human being he is; not just to amalgamate him into some invented literary imitation of a human being.

There are times of year when all these three are overlapped and collaborated, all in the field in the demand, chiefly, of cotton; but more largely, the woman is the servant of the day, and of immediate life, and the man is the servant of the year, and of the basis and boundaries of life, and is their ruler; and the children are the servants of their parents: and the center of all their existence, the central work, that by which they have their land, their shelter, their living, that which they must work for no reward more than this, because they do not own themselves, and without hope or interest, that which they cannot eat and get no money of but which is at the center of their duty and greatest expense of strength and spirit, the cultivation and harvesting of cotton: and all this effort takes place between a sterile earth and an uncontrollable sky in whose propitiation is centered their chief reverence and fear, and the deepest earnestness of their prayers, who read in these machinations of their heaven all signs of a fate which the hardest work cannot much help, and, not otherwise than as the most ancient peoples of the earth, make their plantations in the unpitying pieties of the moon.

My father, my grandfather, my poor damned tragic, not unusually tragic, bitched family and all these millions of each individual people that only want to live in kindness and decency, you never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and ----ing yourself everlastingly and only the hard bastards come through, I'm not born and can't be that hard apparently and God ---- Genius and Works of Art anyway and who the hell am I, who in Jesus' name am I. This is a beautiful country. You can take that and good art and love together and stick them up your ---. And if you think da dialectic is going to ring any conceivably worthwhile changes, you can stick that and yourself up after. Just an individualizing intellectual. Bad case of infantilism. And ---- you, too.

For half my blood is just this; and half my right of speech; and bland chance alone is my life so softened and sophisticated in the years of my defenselessness, and I am robbed of a royalty I can not only never claim, but never properly much desire or regret.

It is not likely for her; it is not likely for any of you, my beloved, whose poor lives I have already so betrayed and should you see these things so astounded, so destroyed, I dread to dare that I shall ever look into your dear eyes again: and soon, quite soon now, in two years, in five, in forty, it will all be over, and one by one we shall all be drawn into the planet beside one another; let us know, let us know there is cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun, and in slow agonies and all deceptions clearing; and in the teeth of all hope of cure which shall pretend its denial and hope of good use to men, let us most quietly and in most reverent fierceness say, not by its captive but by its utmost meanings:
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come: thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: give us this day our daily bread: and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us: and lead us not into temptation: but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom: and the power: and the glory: for ever and ever: amen.

When there was an earthquake in Haiti early this year, television coverage was speedy and morally righteous. I heard many announces, television personalities, and correspondents asking where such and such aid was and why wasn't the aid being delivered faster and don't you see all these problems and how deplorable is all this and yet sublime for the human struggle and will to triumph. Particularly of note, I remember seeing a small boy, who looked to be naked, hugging his knees and looking around as people walked by him, looking entirely scared and worried and not knowing what to do. This image is in my memory because I saw it every commercial break, every time they displayed the network's logo and "Breaking News" graphics. It was always the same shot and the boy always looked just as naked, just as bewildered, just as scared, just as lost in the middle of a million busy people all bigger than he was.

What happened to the boy?

There are too many stories for every story to be told, and surely the television crews had their hands full and there really is only so much air time. And maybe someone did help him. Of course this shot probably drew quite a few viewers in--it was very compelling--so you can say that the boy made the network quite a lot of money. I doubt he received any compensation for that. But then again maybe those people who watched were compelled to donate and so maybe this naked knee-hugging boy is responsible for large sums of money that would otherwise have been slightly less large. Still, I don't know what happened to this boy.

Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about three families: he gloried in their very factualness, their livingness, and yet with the printing of his words, the telling of their story, what happened to them? Vollmann and Steinbeck the same. All these authors who write of what is real, they leave uprooted the lives they've told. You see, like a camera catching and moving into fame for anonymous brevity the face of some child bystander, victim, representative, all the famous men's relatings of their relations with those who are not famous are sneakingly vile. Not only are they unfair, but they happen also to be incredibly painful, fraudulent, and you could even say that they use people. Because they steal the emotion, the pain, the happiness, the is, the life and personality of these who are defenseless in the realm of fame, and they (the famous) use them (they who are not) as so much reason to make money and speeches, and even sometimes to draw morals. Often they do not ask permission. Many times they even do it covertly so that no unfamous has even a hope of representing their self as the famous will represent him or herself through the story of the unfamous.

And now the famous men are still famous and some even have made their fame off those who are not, like fortunes made off the unfortunate, we find that the unfamous vanished and we do not know the fullness of their story; they have become nothing more than pages to the fullness of the famous man's story. And is he even thankful? Are we? Who remembers them after the prop they were made into? Who can?

Travels with Charley

John Steinbeck

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has a personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

Charley is a tall dog. As he sat in the seat beside me, his head was almost as high as mine. He put his nose close to my ear and said, "Ftt." He is the only dog I ever knew who could pronounce the consonant F. This is because his front teeth are crooked, a tragedy which keeps him out of dog shows; because his upper front teeth slightly engage his lower lip Charley can pronounce F. The word "Ftt" usually means he would like to salute a bush or a tree. I opened the cab door and let him out, and he went about his ceremony. He doesn't have to think about it to do it well. It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness--chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. "It is a glory," she said, "and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise."

I succumbed utterly to my desolation, made two peanut-butter sandwiches, and went to bed and wrote letters home, passing my loneliness around. Then the rain stopped falling and the trees dripped and I helped to spawn a school of secret dangers. Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.

It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protests against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was a caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As the time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true--a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? Now and then there appear accounts of babies raised by animals--wolves and such. It is usually reported that the youngster crawls on all fours, makes those sounds learned from his foster parents, and perhaps even thinks like a wolf. Only through imitation do we develop toward originality. Take Charley, for example. He has always associated with the learned, the gentle, the literate, and the reasonable both in France and in America. And Charley is no more like a dog dog than he is like a cat. His perceptions are sharp and delicate and he is a mind-reader. I don't know that he can read the thoughts of other dogs, but he can read mine. Before a plan is half formed in my mind, Charley knows about it, and he also knows whether he is to be included in it. There's no question about this. I know too well his look of despair and disapproval when I have just thought that he must be left at home. And so much for the three notes below the red stain on the ketchup bottle.

Here, Charley, I give you a warning, should you be drawn to generalities. If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation? Do they find their emotional fare so bland that it must be spiced with sex and sadism through the medium of the paperback? And if this is so, why are there no condiments save ketchup and mustard to enhance their foods?

The desert, being an unwanted place, might well be the last stand of life against unlife. For in the rich and moist wanted areas of the world, life pyramids against itself and in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life. And what the scorching, searing, freezing, poisoning weapons of non-life have failed to do may be accomplished to the end of its destruction and extinction by the tactics of survival gone sour. If the most versatile of living forms, the human, now fights for survival, as it always has, it can eliminate not only itself but all other life. And if that should transpire, unwanted places like the desert might be the harsh mother of repopulation . For the inhabitants of the desert are well trained and well armed against desolation. Even our own misguided species might re-emerge from the desert. The lone man and his sun-toughened wife who cling to the shade in an unfruitful and uncoveted place might, with their brothers in arms--the coyote, the jackrabbit, the horned toad, the rattlesnake, together with a hoist of armored insects--these trained and tested fragments of life might well be the last hope of life against non-life. The desert has mothered magic things before this.

It's hard to know what to say when there is so much to say. Without wanting to spoil either the thoughts I've had or the thoughts you might have, I don't know how to let out all the excitement and wonder with which reading Travels with Charley filled me. It is not unlikely that in reading this book you will come to the conclusion that John Steinbeck was a prophet.

Looking Backward

Edward Bellamy

Who is capable of self-support? he demanded. There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system.

Looking Backward couldn't be more logical in its arguments, and therefore demonstrates the most damning loophole in logical argument: if your axioms are false, you will deduct entire systems of logical truth that has no bearing on reality.

Bellamy sends a man of the late Nineteenth Century to the eve of the new millennium, Julian West is put to sleep by a hypnotist in May of 1887, his house burns down and everyone he knows thinks he's dead, but really he's just hypno-sleeping until the year 2000, when someone finds him and wakes him up.

The back of my copy actually had a pretty gripping description, if only because of its folly: It is the year 2000---and full employment, material abundance, and social harmony can be found everywhere.

Bellamy's novel is a detail-light exposition of his utopian vision for society. He spends the vast majority of the novel expounding how this perfect system works and a little bit about how it developed from what the novel considers to be the darkest era of humanity. Looking Backward lends itself to, not surprisingly, looking backward; Bellamy's vision of the future reveals something of his perception of reality in 1887.

As an author, perhaps his greatest feat is to capture in brief moments one generation's incredulity at the 'ethical barbarism' of a past generation. But otherwise, he continually forgets that the conceit of the book is that it is written by Nineteenth Century man in the year 2000 to a Twentieth Century audience. When he forgets this, his novel turns into a sermon and is not terribly pleasant to read.

Although Bellamy is pretty far off the mark as to what we are now, he did predict the invention of something that I never would have expected a man of the late-nineteenth century to predict: the credit card.

Loaves and Fishes

Dorothy Day

Ours is a great place for nicknames.

In the Catholic Church one never needs any money to start a good work, Peter replied. People are what are important. If you have the people and they are willing to give their work--that is the thing. God is not to be outdone in generosity. The funds will come in somehow or other.

But there are no wages. Well, people do not need to work for wages. They can offer their services as a gift.

I explained that we were not a community of saints but rather a slipshod group of individuals who were trying to work out certain principles--the chief of which was an analysis of man's freedom and what it implied. We could not put people out on the street, I said, because they acted irrationally and hatefully. We were trying to overcome hatred with love, to understand the forces that made men what they are, to learn something of their backgrounds, their education to change them, if possible from lions into lambs. It was a practice in loving, a learning to love, a paying of the cost of love.

On the other hand, to continue examining these subtleties: What about this business of letting the other fellow get away with things? Isn't there something awfully smug about such piety--building up your own sanctimoniousness at the expense of the increased guilt of someone else? This turning the other cheek, this inviting someone else to be a potential thief or murderer, in order that we may grow in grace--how obnoxious. In that case, I believe I'd rather be the striker than the meek one struck. One would almost rather be a sinner than a saint at the expense of the sinner. No, somehow we must be saved together.

It just happened. It is the living from day to day, taking no thought for the morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, trying literally to follow the Gospel, that resulted in this work.
"Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not away....Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute and calumniate you."

Easiest of all is to have so little, to have given away so much, that there is nothing left to give. But is this ever true? This point of view leads to endless discussions; but the principle remains the same. We are our brother's keeper. Whatever we have beyond our own needs belongs to the poor. If we sow sparingly we will reap sparingly. And it is sad but true that we must give far more than bread, than shelter.

Even then, deep within, I would be sure; even though I said to myself, "I believe because I want to believe, I hope because I want to hope, I love because I want to love." These very desires would be regarded by God as He regarded those of Daniel, who was called a man of desires, and whom He rewarded.

Use your common sense as far as it will take you, Father Roy used to say, and, when you realize you can do nothing, bow your head to the storm and pray--pray without ceasing. If that fails, rejoice that you, too, are accounted worthy to suffer and to realize your weakness and keep on praying like the importunate widow.

The city, the state--we have nicknamed them Holy Mother the City, Holy Mother the State--have taken on a large role in sheltering the homeless: But the ideal is for every family to have a Christ room, as the early fathers of the Church called it. The prophets of Israel certainly emphasized hospitality. It seems to me that in the future the family--the ideal family--will always try to care for one more. If every family that professed to follow Scriptural teaching whether Jew, Protestant, or Catholic, were to do this, there would be no need for huge institutions, houses of dead storage where human beings waste away in loneliness and despair. Responsibility must return to the parish with a hospice and a center for mutual aid, to the group, to the family, to the individual.

I am afraid that nature may become similarly enraged at our own waste here in our too blessed America. You see it on every hand: in the Army, in the jails, in all public institutions. Even the school lunch system gives evidence of it. Corporations hire efficiency engineers to eliminate waste motions and thus help them save a few pennies; unions fight and strike to get a few cents an hour wage increase for their workers. At the same time there is wanton waste everywhere, on the part of every man, woman, and child.

You wonder: how did they do it? Was the world so different that you could take in pretty much everyone off the streets, offer them a bed, and sleep safely? Have perceptions of the homeless, the down and out, so incredibly altered that we cannot even fathom this? Where has this dream gone?

I turned to Loaves and Fishes looking for some kind of explanation that could be my hope. I didn't really find any explanations other than a very hard one: just do it, but I did find some hope. It seems that they didn't have so much better an idea of what they were doing than I.

I envy the Catholic Workers their lack of institution, their abundance of energy and right-timing-ness, their faith, and their freedom. It seems that not so much of this is possible in this day. I feel pathetic even in writing it, because I have not tried, so perhaps the writing is my way of purging this poison so that I can try, but aren't there so many new hurdles? Liability. A different sort of person living in poverty. Sex crimes that seem to be more common (although, I'm not actually convinced this one is true). But how could one open up a building and say, come live with me?

As always Grace. I don't know that there is too much more to say on the subject than that where God requires, God supplies. I wonder if the old truth doesn't remain the big truth: pray. The Catholic Workers spent quite a lot of time in prayer. They went to daily mass. They prayed at the noon time. They prayed Vespers. And they opened their doors wide and feared no evil.

Perhaps one of the greatest aspects of reading Loaves and Fishes is that you get a sense of a life, a world, a set of rules entirely different from those commonly accepted as in force. The Kingdom has a different set of laws and often they don't seem to be possibilities to the world, much less make sense.

As a note. I have been reading quite a few books written in the earlier half of the Twentieth Century and one thing that has poked me in the mind a good deal, has been their asides on the subject of garbage. From Steinbeck to Dorothy Day to Edward Bellamy, people were noticing that garbage was piling up, that we live lifestyles of a particularly wasteful sort, and that it can't go on. It has gone on. Is that ominous?

Travels with Lizbeth

Lars Eighner

Once I was the sort of person who invests objects with sentimental value. Now I no longer have those objects, but I have the sentiments yet.

Home is the natural destination of any homeless person. But nothing can be done in a day, in a week, in a year to get nearer that destination. No perceptible progress can be made. In the absence of progress, time is nearly meaningless. Some days are more comfortable than others. And that is all the difference. A homeless life has no storyline. It is a pointless circular rambling about the stage that can be brought to happy conclusion only by a deus ex machina.

In spite of the challenges that homelessness presented, the chief characteristic of my experience of homelessness was tedium. The days and nights that Lizbeth and I were literally without a roof over our heads, although by far the majority of the more than two years encompassed here, are represented by relatively few examples. One of those days was so much like each of the others that to call any of them typical would be an understatement. Our immediate needs I met with more or less trouble, but once that was done I could do no more. Day after day I could aspire, within reason, to nothing more than survival. Although the planets wandered among the stars and the moon waxed and waned, the identical naked barrenness of existence was exposed to me, day in and day out. I do not think I could write a narrative that would quite capture the unrelenting ennui of homelessness, but if I were to write it, no one could bear to read it. I spare myself as much as the reader in not attempting to recall so many empty hours. Every life has trivial occurrences, pointless episodes, and unresolved mysteries, but a homeless life has these and virtually nothing else. I have found it best in some parts to abandon a strictly chronological account and to treat in essay form experiences that relate to a single subject although they occurred in disparate times and places.

Unfortunately anyone who writes a book about being homeless is bound to miss the true heart of the thing because anyone who can write a book is not going to be homeless like the homeless are. If you are capable of writing a book you are capable of much more than most people in the world, and one of the things you are capable of is finding yourself a home. This doesn't mean, however, that you cannot make accurate observations, as in Travels with Lizbeth.

The Homeless

Christopher Jencks

Even in America, the world's most commercialized society, blame is still free. That means there is always plenty for everyone.

The Homeless provides an extensive statistical analysis of homelessness and its causes in and before the early '90s. One of the truths Jencks illuminates most starkly is that when society (read: ) looks at poor people they will see what they want, whether in the causes or in the realities or in the statistics.

The Dumb Ox

G K Chesterton

What is called the Manichean philosophy has had many forms; indeed it has attacked what is immortal and immutable with a very curious kind of immortal mutability. It is like the legend of the magician who turns himself into a snake or a cloud; and the whole has that nameless note of irresponsibility, which belongs to much of the metaphysics and morals of Asia, from which the Manichean mystery came. But it is always in one way or another a notion that nature is evil; or that evil is at least rooted in nature. The essential point is that as evil has roots in nature, so it has rights in nature. Wrong has as much right to exist as right. As already stated this notion took many forms. Sometimes it was a dualism, which made evil an equal partner with good; so that neither could be called an usurper. More often it was a general idea that demons had made the material world, and if there were any good spirits, they were concerned only with the spiritual world. Later, again, it took the form of Calvinism, which held that God had indeed made the world, but in a special sense, made the evil as well as the good: had made an evil will as well as an evil world. On this view, if a man chooses to damn his soul alive, he is not thwarting God's will but rather fulfilling it. In these two forms of the early Gnosticism and the later Calvinism, we see the superficial variety and fundamental unity of Manicheanism. The old Manicheans taught that Satan originated the whole work of creation commonly attributed to God. The new Calvinists taught that God originates the whole work of damnation commonly attributed to Satan. One looked back to the first day when a devil acted like a god, the other looked forward to a last day when a god acted like a devil. But both had the idea that the creator of the earth was primarily the creator of the evil, whether we call him a devil or a god.

Since there are a good many Manicheans among the Moderns, as we may remark in a moment, some may agree with this view, some may be puzzled about it, some may only be puzzled about why we should object to it. To understand the medieval controversy, a word must be said of the Catholic doctrine, which is as modern as it is medieval. That 'God looked on all things and saw that they were good' contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.

Hooray for Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Dumb Ox!

In the old, old argument between intention and action, I have missed entirely the third dimension: the actual thing. There is what you actually do, say hit someone with a shovel. There is what you intended to do: stop them from breathing by putting the shovel in their mouth. And there is the actual thing: the shovel. Clearly the shovel is not a bad thing. The intention is a bad thing. So perhaps is the action of hitting someone with a shovel. It is difficult to think of a situation where the act of hitting someone with a shovel is a thing that is good, that God smiles upon. So then maybe with the reintroduction of this third element--the shovel--we can realize that there are actually only two elements: the thing and its use.

Use includes intent and the action. So often it seems like intent and action are separable, but the problem with separating them is that sometimes they are not separable (ex. cursing someone) and if we treat them as separate entities, what are we to do with them when they are an inseparable entity? It is important that Chesterton didn't say "there are no bad things only bad intentions," instead he said "uses".

A Personal Matter

Kenzaburo Oe

Well then, don't hesitate to let me know if there's anything I can do. Bird and the doctor bowed decorously and passed each other on the stairs with faces averted. Well, that's probably for the best! the doctor had said. To weaken and die before they could operate. That meant escaping the burden of a vegetable baby, and without fouling your own hands with its murder. All you had to do was wait for the baby to weaken and die hygienically in a modern hospital ward. Nor was it impossible to forget about it while you waited: that would be Bird's job. Well, that's probably for the best! The sensation of deep and dark shame renewed itself in Bird and he could feel his body stiffen. Like the expectant mothers and the women who had just given birth who passed him in their many-colored rayon nightgowns, like those who carried in their bodies a large, squirming mass, and those who had not quite escaped the memory and habit of it, Bird took short, careful steps. He was pregnant himself, in the womb of his brain, with a large squirming mass that was the sensation of shame.

We're a pack of vermin, Bird thought, a loathsome league of self-defenders. Nonetheless he delivered his report, his voice hushed, wary of the patients who might be crouching like mute crickets behind the closed doors that lined the corridor, their ears aflame with curiosity: The baby's milk is being decreased and he's getting a sugar-water substitute. The doctor in charge said we should be seeing results in a few days.

How the above quotations make you feel pretty much says it all about A Personal Matter.

Five Essays on Man and Nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill in what we call casual or fortuitous events.

So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hellfire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this limp band.

'T is the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty,--knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it at least for your good.

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe that he has, hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down,--with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired,--into a selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal? A learned physician tells us the fact is invariable with the Neopolitan, that when mature he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little overstated--but may pass.

If Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions and weights are wings and means,--we are reconciled.

One wonders what Emerson thought of Hope? It seems to me that there can be few entities so diametrically opposed as Fate and Hope. What does the fated man have to hope for? What does the man of hope have to fear from his fate?