the plain sense of things

Snow / Saul Leiter / 1960

Street Scene / Saul Leiter / 1959



The Plain Sense of Things
Wallace Stevens 

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house.

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition

In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

New York circa 1950 / Saul Leiter

(thinking about aging.  of course i am not old enough to be house in disrepair. but the spirit of aging, the awareness that you are, at times and in variation, not always fully alive, like a glossless pond with lilies that no one really sees.  that this is inevitable, that we should not fight it.  that it is only a moment, one of many.)