FAVORITE SINGLE-SENTENCE QUOTE: “Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me that I could hear whispers secret surges smell the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret flesh watching against red eyelids the swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea and he we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it’s not always and I it doesn’t have to be even that long for a man of courage and he do you consider that courage and I yes sir don’t you and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself than any act otherwise you could not be in earnest and I you don’t believe I am serious and he I think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldn’t have driven to the expedient of telling me you had committed incest otherwise and I wasn’t lying I wasn’t lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise the truth and I it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and the sound of it would be as though it had never been and he did you try to make her do it and I, I was afraid to I was afraid she might and then it wouldn’t have done any good but if I could tell you we did it would have been so and then the others wouldn’t be so and then the world would roar away and he and now this other you are not lying now either but you are still blind to what is in yourself to that part of general truth the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every man’s brow even Benjy’s you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead and I temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this now we’re getting at it you seem to regard it merely as an experience that will whiten your hair overnight so to speak without altering your appearance at all you won’t do it under these conditions it would be a gamble and the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows beforehand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not deceive a child until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realized that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman and I temporarily and he it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willy-nilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time no you will not do that until you come to believe that even she was not quite worth despair perhaps and I, I will never do that nobody knows what I know and he I think you’d better go on up to Cambridge right away you might go up into Maine for a month you can afford it if you are careful it might be a good thing watching pennies has healed more scars than Jesus and I suppose I realize what you believe I will realize up there next week or next month and he then you will remember that for you to go to Harvard has been your mother’s dream since you were born and no Compson has ever disappointed a lady and I temporary it will be better for me for all of us and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another man’s wellbeing and I temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world it’s not despair until time it’s not even time until it was “The last note sounded.” – The Sound and the Fury (pgs. 176-178), by William Faulkner
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 01:22:41 +0000