Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance: A Novel

by Richard Powers

When we don’t know what we are after, we risk passing it over in the dark.

The photo caption touched off a memory: Three farmers on their way to a dance, 1914. The date sufficed to show they were not going to their expected dance.

I was not going to my expected dance. We would all be taken blindfolded into a field somewhere in this tortured century and made to dance until we’d had enough. Dance until we dropped. Chapter Two Westerwald Farmers on

The realities of the past become true only when they intersect the present.

Only when grief sets in—grief, like sound, that varies with the temperature of the air—does the past in fact die.

Mays felt an urge to tell her not to end a sentence in a preposition, but could not decide if “from” was one.

The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home. —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

pioneering social realism, Sander remained a miner, suspicious of the avant-garde and of ideas, more comfortable with the Westerwald

Sander, at the same time as those working in physics, psychology, political science, and other disciplines, blundered against and inadvertently helped uncover the principal truth of this century: viewer and viewed are fused into an indivisible whole.

To see an object from a distance is already to act on it, to change it, to be changed.

Sander’s objective, unprecedented portrait of the one-legged, uniformed veteran pandering in the street for loose change, an image later taken up by painters George Grosz and Otto Dix, salutes this new social

The problem with getting by was no longer that life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Lately, the difficulty was that life had become comfy, ghoulish, and long.

BIOGRAPHIES ASK THE question “How do the details of this particular life demonstrate the spirit of its times?”

Memory, then, is not only a backward retrieval of a vanished event, but also a posting forward, at the remembered instant, to all other future moments of corresponding circumstance.

For as he drew close enough to see them, he had frozen in place: they were the old couple from one of the bicyclist’s photographs, spread out by the side of the road that May Day. Or were they?

on the one hand, those who saw the image of Christ and found in it a promise of redemption in the aftermath of tragedy, and on the other, those who saw only melted silver, the handiwork of the Germans. Yet when the Germans rounded them up for the night’s internment, miraclists and skeptics alike broke into spontaneous singing of “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” the Passion Chorale.

The objective truth—that loose masonry falling on the helmet of a jittery Prussian boy had caused him to fire on a knot of shopkeepers, who in turn had sent word to the stockpilers to bring out the pointed sticks—was of no importance now to either side, a detail lost to the past.

The altar of history, put up for her own amusement, had grown out of control, too big to sift through.

No one can deny that this century’s wars have been exercises of mechanical power, nor can one doubt—equivocal theories of deterrence notwithstanding—that the mere existence of fifty thousand nuclear warheads raises the possibility of annihilation above zero. But this camp takes an even stronger antitechnological stand: mass reproduction of photographic images represents and initiates those values that would destroy beauty, singularity, and all that is human and humane. To

. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material.

the death of the instant of vision, the death of the eye, which, without the permanent record made by the machine, gradually loses the quality revealed to it in the moment of seeing.

toweling dry, it was not out of

It was true; she, who had survived the worst part of the century, did not need my pleasantries to protect

The old need honesty, not deference.

Afterward, when it was dead and long overdue for the heap, she found she had nicked it up too badly to part with it. The cash she could get for it would not compensate for the loss of so perfect a road map of all

her accidents and angers along the axis of time. She explained, with a shoulder shrug, that the value of memorabilia—value in general—lay beyond anyone’s ability to say anything meaningful about the matter.

dinner and said the prayer. Then he told us—my mother, two brothers, sister, I was the young one—how the great Henry Ford was sailing by Europe to stop the war. The War: total war, they called it; total meant against the people too, and the full work of the nation, with guns

For the Socialist, because he built a factory around the time and size of the worker, where the machine came to the man and men worked together on one production. He raised up the worker.

A subtle shift in posture and she no longer talked about history but about experience, direct personal experience, that commodity that grows more endangered daily.

and I broke off, sick of the old debate between fatalism and activism. I had no fresh line, nothing to add, no peace plan for the hundred-year war

between the private citizen and the mechanized state, no argument that Mrs. Schreck, who had seen sights well beyond argument and counter-argument, could use.

darkroom of each viewer’s imagination. I understood at last that if we have sacrificed the old aura, the religious awe of a singular work of art, we have, in mechanical reproduction, gotten something in compensation. If the photographer is as powerless as we viewers in

giving authenticity to a print, then we viewers are at least as capable as the photographer of investing a print with history and significance.