The Six Thousand Mile Parade of Words

Leaving work yesterday, I had wanted to sit outside in the fresh and simply not think -- I had endured enough thinking this week, I decided.
Sadly, the persistent, biting GNATS in our backyard had other ideas, so I left the great outdoors, returned inside our house, and picked up a book.
I still didn't want to think too much, so I am not sure what possessed me to pick up "LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN," open it to the preamble by author JAMES AGEE, and glance at the following passage:
"...the whole memory of the South in its six-thousand-mile parade and flowering outlay of the façades of cities, and of the eyes in the streets of towns, and of hotels, and of the trembling heat, and of the wide wild opening of the tragic land, wearing the trapped frail flowers of its garden of faces; the fleet flush and flower and fainting of the human crop it raises; the virulent, insolent, deceitful, pitying, infinitesimal and frenzied running and searching, on this colossal peasant map, of two angry, futile and bottomless, botched and overcomplicated youthful intelligences in the service of an anger and of a love and of an undiscernible truth, and in the frightening vanity of their would-be purity; the sustaining, even now, and forward moving, lifted on the lifting of this day as ships on a wave, above whom, in a few hours, night once more will stand up in his stars, and they decline through lamplight and be dreaming statues, of those, each, whose lives we knew and whom we love and intend well toward, and of whose living we know little in some while now, save that quite steadily, in not much possible change for better or much worse, mute, innocent, helpless and incorporate among that small-moted and inestimable swarm and pollen stream and fleet of single, irreparable, unrepeatable existences, they are led, gently, quite steadily, quite without mercy, each a little farther toward the washing and the wailing, the sunday suit and the prettiest dress, the pine box, and the closed clay room whose frailly decorated roof, until rain has taken it flat into oblivion, wears the shape of a ritual scar and of an inverted boat: curious, obscene, terrifying, beyond all search of dream unanswerable, those problems which stand thickly forth like light from all matter, triviality, chance, intention, and record in the body, of being, of truth, of conscience, of hope, of hatred, of beauty, of indignation, of guilt, of betrayal, of innocence, of forgiveness, of vengeance, of guardianship, of an indenominable fate, predicament, destination, and God."
What?
At first, I feared I was reading some foreign language, or, worse, that I had been struck with a sudden, irreversible illiteracy.
What did this passage mean? Couldn't they afford periods during the Dust Bowl? Why does it feel like WILLIAM FAULKNER is haunting me from my college days?
I must have read Agee's passage seven times in total. Each time a little more meaning would seep into my blurry consciousness -- I think.
I decided it might be best to simply push on into the book and come back to the "six thousand mile parade" later.
That's when I reached this passage:
"Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music."
Now *that* is something I can understand!
Agee and I might get along OK after all.