CashI made it on the bevel.1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest upand down or straight across.4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams andjoints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down.5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams aremade sideways, because the stress is sideways.6. Except.7. A body is not square like a crosstie.8. Animal magnetism.9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, sothe seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and-down.12. So I made it on the bevel.13. It makes a neater job.
I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man’s good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.
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.
The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice.
Está oscuro. Oigo el bosque, el silencio: los conozco bien. Pero ningún sonido vivo; ni siquiera a él. Era como si la oscuridad lo sacara de su integridad convirtiéndose en una dispersión inconexa de elementos: mucosidades y pataleos, olor a carne tibia y pelo apestando a amoniaco; una ilusión de un conjunto coordinado de piel con manchas y huesos poderosos dentro de la cual, disperso y secreto y familiar, hay un ser diferente de mi ser. Le veo disolverse - las patas, un ojo muy abierto, manchas alegres como llamas frías - y flotar en la oscuridad en solución que se desvanece; todo uno y sin embargo ninguno; todos los dos pero ninguno. Veo con el oído que se enrosca hacia él, le acaricia, le da su forma definitiva: cernejas, lomo, brazuelo y cabeza. Olor y sonido. No estoy asustado.
It was that boy. I said Here; you better take a holt of my hand and he waited and held to me. I be durn if it wasn’t like he come back and got me; like he was saying They wont nothing hurt you. Like he was saying about a fine place he knowed where Christmas come twice with Thanksgiving and lasts on through the winter and the spring and the summer, and if I just stayed with him I’d be all right too. When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you’ve got to have a tight jar or you’ll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man. And
He is the greatest artist the South has produced.… Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century [yet] for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics. —RALPH ELLISON Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being. —JOHN STEINBECK For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country. —ROBERT PENN WARREN No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there. —EUDORA WELTY
As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner’s writing as there are readers. There are hundreds of books devoted to interpretations of his novels, numerous biographies, and every year high school teachers and college professors guide their students through one or more of the novels. But after all is said and done, there are the books themselves, and the pleasure of reading them can be deep and lasting. The language Faulkner uses ranges from the poetically beautiful, nearly biblical to the coarse sounds of rough dialect. His characters linger in the mind, whether for their heroism or villainy, their stoicism or self-indulgence, their honesty or deceitfulness or self-deception, their wisdom or stupidity, their gentleness or cruelty. In short, like Shakespeare, William Faulkner understood what it means to be human.
Sometimes I aint so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it. Because
Sometimes I aint so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
When I look back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you've got to have a tight jar or you'll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man.
It’s like some folks has the smooth, pretty boards to build a courthouse with and others dont have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse, and when they both build shoddy or build well, neither because it’s one or tother is going to make a man feel the better nor the worse.