.
Gas pump, with clothesline, barn and horse-drawn wagon: photographer unknown, c. 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)
Reality, he said on the way to the fair, is composed of the external world.
The road rutted and bumpy, a tire, a mattress, a bed frame and a dresser tied to the running board, a towheaded child perched like a small ragged pasha on top: steam belching from the radiator, by the roadside, stalled: we passed them along the way, and did not stop.
At the Vermont State Fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)
There are men of the small towns and villages, he said, who carry in them what remains of those small towns and villages. There is not that world any more. This is a wider world. There are novelties to be experienced. There are bizarre enormities. This may come as a shock. There is sudden laughter; a tingling of sensation, confused, curiously mixed: desire, wonder, fear; an inexplicable sadness; a feeling of some concealed danger encroaching; perhaps the danger is nonexistent; perhaps it is real, perhaps very near. Freaks, deformities, horrors previously unknown: all to be experienced by anyone, by everyone, at these ordinary common gatherings, these fairs.
There are men of a province who are that province, he said. This is not that province any more.
