("Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" + "巴黎伦敦落魄记")

[fiefoe]

James Agee's dense syntax gave my brain quite a workout. Maybe only a young man can write like this, keeping his anger at an energetic boil throughout.

• Unbias, when skillfully enough qualified, is exchangeable at any bank for money (and in politics, for votes, job patronage, abelincolnism, etc.) 
• the wide wild opening of the tragic land, wearing the trapped frail flowers of its garden of faces; the fleet flush and flower and fainting of the human crop it raises;
• ... and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.
• It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist. His great weight, mystery, and dignity are in this fact.
• ... 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.
• the emasculation of acceptance
• Performance, in which the whole fate and terror rests
• the American genius for sterility, unimagination and general gutlessness in meeting any opportunity for 'reform' or 'improvement'

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"巴黎伦敦落魄记", or better known as "Down and Out in Paris and London" is another young man (George Orwell)'s close encounter with  destitution. Grim, nothing picturesque about this really.