Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar, I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.
She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.
I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival tent with some one who was always being converted.
You'll always remember me when you think about old times won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.
Walker Evans - roadside stand in Birmingham AL
Dorothea Lange
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