For in the immediate world, everything is to be
discerned, for him who can discern it,
and centrally and simply, without either
dissection into science or digestion into art
but with the whole of consciousness,
seeking to perceive it as it stands:
so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can
roar in the heart of itself as a symphony,
perhaps as no symphony can,
and all of consciousness is shifted from
the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.
And it is in these terms I would tell you,
at all leisure, and in all detail, whatever there
is to tell: of where I am: of what I perceive.
- James Agee
