`The Afterlife of Things'

I’m surprised to find myself enjoying books written by an academic sociologist, a specialist in criminology, Richard Quinney. His earlier volumes carry uninviting titles like The Social Reality of Crime and Criminal Justice in America. Now 73, Quinney has turned in his later years to a radically different sort of book, a hybrid of photographs and text somewhat reminiscent of Wright Morris’ pioneering “photo-texts.” Quinney is a lesser writer and photographer than Morris but his purpose is admirable: to document the farm in Wisconsin on which his family lived for four generations. His great-grandparents fled Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s and settled in Walworth County, in southeast Wisconsin, where they built the house in which Quinney was born. By chronicling the local and particular he illuminates a larger gone world – the small, family-owned farm.

Quinney has published six “borderland” books, as he calls them, most written since his retirement from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill. It should be noted that NIU, on Valentine’s Day, was the scene of yet another campus shooting. A gunman killed six people, wounded 16 and ended his own life. I was reading Of Time and Place: A Farm in Wisconsin on the day of the killings.

Quinney’s books resemble genealogical scrapbooks. The past is precious and the author feels an obligation to preserve it. In Of Time and Place: A Farm in Wisconsin (2006), he writes: “I am haunted by the mysteries of time and place. Fortunate I am to have my camera to see into the afterlife of things.” His photographs the contents of barns and stables, kitchens and attics, and in their black-and-white plainness, they hint at this “haunted” quality. I also have Borderland: A Midwest Journal, published by the University of Wisconsin Press (2001). Quinney is best when he sticks to particulars and resists his proclivity for vapid philosophizing: “Earth and sky are joined; I become one with the universe.” In Borderland he ranges beyond Wisconsin, photographically documenting other places he has visited – Amsterdam, Paris, New York City – but he always returns to native turf.

For a sociologist, Quinney has good taste in writers. He dotes on Thoreau, another connoisseur of the local:

“This summer I think especially about Thoreau’s visit to the Midwest. Just a few miles north of where I live, Thoreau passed on a train speeding from Chicago to a station near the Mississippi on the Illinois and Wisconsin border. Each time I drive north to the farm and cross the tracks on Annie Glidden Road, I think of Thoreau sitting in the coach car and looking out of the window at a countryside far from his native New England home. On an early summer morning in 1861, he returned home on these tracks for the last summer of his life.”

Thoreau had tuberculosis, the scourge of 19th-century artists. A doctor suggested he go to the West Indies, France or even the Mississippi Valley. True to his contrarian nature Thoreau decided on Minnesota. He travel 3,500 miles, mostly by rail, the longest journey of his life. He left Concord on May 11, 1861, and returned July 10, cutting his planned excursion by a month. Quinney conjectures, convincingly, that Thoreau knew he was dying and wanted to do so at home, on his own piece of “borderland.” Thoreau died May 6, 1862, in Concord.

Quinney effectively cites Matsuo Bashō, Baudelaire, Hamlin Garland, Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Beckett and Aldo Leopold – an odd gathering in a book dedicated to the upper Midwest. Best of all, on Page 119 he reproduces a photo titled “Still Life, Rolfe Road”: arranged on a white mantelpiece, against a white wall are a small framed photo, a figurine that appears to be Chinese, a porcelain vase, a glass vase with snapdragons (two petals fallen), and a glass or crystal clock with the hands at 11:37. Across from the classically arranged photo is this passage:

“A month saved again by ordinariness. The mundane world filled with the wonder of daily living. A life lived and a life preserved. My benediction for the month is from the epilogue of Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with Bridle: `O holy ritual of everydayness, without you time is empty like a falsified inventory that corresponds to no real objects.’”