Genesis
The summer of 1915 was a significant year for James Agee: it was not long before his father died in 1916. According to Agee, it was the point around which his life began to evolve (Aiken). When Barber was writing his own Knoxville, his father, Roy Barber, was losing his health and rapidly approaching death. Barber dedicates the work with the inscription "In memory of my Father," suggesting that his father's deteriorating health had something to do with his identification with the piece. Barber was touched by the familiarity of Agee's childhood memories and the fact that both he and Agee were five years old in 1915. After Barber and Agee met, Barber noted that the two had much in common.
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middlesized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards. (James Agee, Knoxville)
Read more about this topic: Knoxville: Summer Of 1915
Famous quotes containing the word genesis:
“Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
—Bible: Hebrew Genesis 1:29.
But in a later context, God told the disgraced Adam, “and thou shalt eat the herb of the field” (Genesis 3:18)
“Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)