You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.
But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
So you see how much effort a man will make and trouble he will invent to guard and defend himself from the boredom of peace of mind. Or rather perhaps the pervert who deliberately infests himself with lice, not just for the simple pleasure of being rid of them again, since even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts; but because even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing, even lice.
At night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older.
It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show.
I don’t mean a 1905 Republican – I don’t know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any – I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a mad who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write.
And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.
He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.
He puts his shoes on, stomping into them, like he does everything, like he is hoping all the time he really cant do it and can quit trying to.
She wasn’t born for this kind of life. You have to be born for this like you have to be born a butcher or a barber, I guess. Wouldn’t anybody be either of them just for money or fun.
It does last,” Horace said. “Spring does. You’d almost think there was some purpose to it.
Then alone, of all church gatherings, is there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.
Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.
He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary.
It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.
When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.
And then he died. He did not know he was dead.
It’s a curious thing how no matter what’s wrong with you, a man’ll tell you to have your teeth examined and a woman’ll tell you to get married.