Reflections on James Agee and the Good Life

What is the essence of a good life? Contemporary philosophers have offered a variety of answers, including “active engagement in projects of worth,” (Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters), “the exercise of cognitive, affective, sensory, and social powers,” (Richard Kraut, What Is Good and Why), and “significant engagement in activities through which we come into appreciative rapport with agent-neutral values” (Stephen Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care). The implication appears to be that regardless of whether the goal is described as “achieving well-being,” “living well,” or “attaining meaning,” merely following the routines of daily life is insufficient.

I want to suggest, however, that seemingly ordinary lives can be satisfying. The point is movingly captured in “Knoxville, Summer of 1915,” an inspired piece of prose that James Agee wrote in 1938, and that Samuel Barber set to haunting music for voice and orchestra nearly a decade later. The title calls to mind an unremarkable time and place at which unexceptional people carried out common activities. Yet their significance is illuminated by Agee’s writing, which I shall take the liberty of quoting at some length:

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 just apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middle-sized 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, and porches. …

The men were mostly small businessmen, one or two very modestly executives, one or two worked with their hands, most of them clerical, and most of them between thirty and forty-five.

But it is of these evenings, I speak.

“Supper was at six and was over by half past….The children ran out first hell bent and yelling those names by which they were known; then the fathers sank out leisurely in crossed suspenders, their collars removed and their necks looking tall and shy. … When [the mothers] came out they had taken off their aprons and their skirts were dampened and they sat in rockers on their porches quietly.

In the evening the fathers hosed their lawns. Agee writes: “[T]he hoses were set much alike, in a compromise between distance and tenderness of spray (and quite surely a sense of art behind this compromise, and a quiet deep joy, too real to recognize itself)…” The people are “gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living….” The scene is dominated by the sounds and sights of summer nights, including the hiss of the hoses and the noise of the locusts and crickets.

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. … They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.

In concluding, Agee meditates, “May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.” (The death of Agee’s father in a car accident when Agee was five years old is the focal event in his evocative autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.)

Agee portrays families living together in a mutually supportive community, and, despite their individual problems, finding some contentment. Did they engage in “projects of worth,” exercise “cognitive, affective, sensory, and social powers,” or find “rapport with agent-neutral values”? I do not know, and I doubt the people themselves would even have understood the questions. They found a calming rhythm in their lives. How many of us can claim likewise?

Those residents of Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915 are for the most part forgotten, and they, along with their hopes and concerns, have disappeared. Yet if we can be as content and humane as the people Agee describes, we should consider our own lives successful.    

Photograph: In 1912, the Knoxville Florists’ Society holds its second annual picnic and charters a special train for the event.

Steven M. Cahn

Steven M. Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The most recent books he has authored are Religion Within Reason (Columbia University Press, 2017); Teaching Philosophy: A Guide (Routledge, 2018); Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies (Rutgers University Press, 2019); The Road Traveled and Other Essays (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2019); Philosophical Adventures (Broadview Press, 2019); A Philosopher’s Journey: Essays from Six Decades (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2020), and Navigating Academic Life (Routledge, 2021).