He drank not only because whisky made him drunk but because,
away from his father, he found the sudden freedom oppressive.
The suffering hasn’t come quite yet. Not yet. It will take a
while longer. He doesn’t quite believe it, feeling with that certainty of selfish men that he will
never come by misfortune. The suffering will come suddenly, though. And soon.
The grief is coming now, she said to herself: He’s beginning
to know what suffering is. Perhaps that’s good in a way. Perhaps that’s good
for a man finally to know what suffering is, to know what a woman somehow knows
almost from the day she’s born.
Maybe that’s the key to happiness – being sort of dumb, not wanting to
know any of the answers.
The hearse came up with sleek, privileged gravity.
During the last few years he had relied upon her steadfast
gaze of love and longing, perhaps unconsciously enough, as one among the
assortment of props and crutches, which supported him against the unthinkable
notion that life was not rich and purposeful and full of rewards.
Haunting him still, his father’s ghost, words said years
ago: an old man in whom obscurity resembled solemnity often enough, and solemnity wisdom, but who
nonetheless – through a
stew of dogmatism and misinformation, in mild, uncomprehending protest at a world that long ago had
passed him by – managed
to say things which, if not precisely wise, were at least durable truisms,
self-tested.
Being a Southerner and a Virginian and of course a Democrat
you will find yourself in the unique position of choosing between a) those
ideals implanted as right and proper in every man since Jesus Christ and no doubt
before and especially in Virginians and (b) ideals inherent in you through a
socio-economic culture over which you have no power to prevail; consequently I
strongly urge you my son always to be a good Democrat but to be a good man too
if you possibly can.
A Sunday school choir commenced a falsetto chirping. Jesus
loves me. Methodists, probably. He could almost see it: a row of maple chairs,
young women with bad breath and half-moons of sweat beneath their armpits, a
basement somewhere smelling of stale leaking water and moldy religion.
It had been so simple at that age to be cruel, since
eighteen has no heart.
She was beautiful, she was young, and these two things
together caused Helen the bitterest anguish.
Only poets and thieves can exercise free will, and most of
them die young.
Both crucifix and river, in their different ways, sometimes
offered contentment and poignant, fugitive hints of another world.
From isolated branches the last leaves were falling in
endless spirals of loneliness.
The cowardly Puritan, he had always thought, or the cowardly
fundamentalist, unwilling to partake of free religious inquiry, uses the devil
as a scapegoat to rid himself of the need for positive action: “The devil
forced me,” he says, instead of, “I turned my eyes from Christ’s example,” and
by this process of negativism is enabled to perform any crime under the sun against humanity and reason.
Because he was never sure of the worth of his judgments he
often quoted imaginary sources to lend an air of authority.
Wherever you walk I’ll think of you because there are miles
more for both of us before we go to sleep.
For a man to arise in me, that the man I am should cease to
be.
People who want a king nowadays want one with an aluminum
scepter, preferably collapsible, homespun robes and a big, broad smile.
Grandmother, who suffered from arthritis and an excess of
the Bible.
Those people back in the Lost Generation. They thought they
were lost. They were crazy. They weren’t lost. What they were doing was losing
us.
A song of measureless innocence that echoed among lost
ruined temples of peace and brought to their dreams an impossible vision: of a
love that outlasted time and dwelt even in the night, beyond reach of death and
all the immemorial, descending dusks.
The sense of horror and failure had clutched his spine like
the wet, wrinkled hand of a drowned woman.
She’s lost love and grief maybe, he thought, but not hate.
Not hate.
The simple touch of a hand redeems us, and who knows, when
fingers clasp each other and press to the white, invisible bones, what
chemistry then? There is a decency in us that prevails and this touch, perhaps,
only reaffirms it.
He had had to cure something in her, and because she was a
reluctant patient, who had taken pains to nourish her suffering, his cure had
been forcible, abrupt and highly emotional.
He was an old man, suspicious of progress.
The bay was filled like a bowl with silence, and upon its
surface, as if scraped off from the moon, lay a litter of careless silver.
How, having committed so much wrong, would he ever get out
of life alive?
You look sad, my dear – you need wine and poesy.
Maybe I did cause all this. I killed with kindness the only
thing I ever cared for, really. Maybe we’re all just too highstrung. They
should have never put the idea of love in the mind of an animal.
You can’t even suffer properly, you’re like all the rest of
the sad neurotics everywhere who huddle over their misery and take their vile,
mean little hatreds out on anybody they envy.
I know I’m not perfect but I’m free and young and if I’m not
happy I at least know that someday I can be happy if I work at it long enough.
I’m free. If I’d hung around in Port Warwick you’d have your claws in me then.
I’d be obeying your precious code of Christian morality, which is phony anyway.
But it’s not that way. I’m free and you can’t stand it.
The dead do not remain long dead in big cities, or perhaps
they become deader.
If you stand here on the hill beneath a dead, wind-twisted
cedar, the island’s only tree, you can get a good view of the land – the sewage plant and the
prison and the burial ground, each recipient, in its fashion, of waste and decay.
I’m communing with the spirits of the dead.
I refuse to be needed unless I’m loved too and so to hell
with you.
It is symptomatic of that society that it should produce the
dissolving family. I know you say symptomatic not of that society, but of our
society, the machine culture, yet so archetypical is this South with its
cancerous religiosity, its exhausting need to put manners before morals, to
negate all ethos... Call it a husk of a culture.
It was a landscape dead and forlorn yet retentive of some
glowing, vagrant majesty, and against it the old man’s eyes looked proudly
upward, toward God perhaps, or perhaps just the dying sun.
Who knows our last end, thrown from the hub of the universe
into the dark, into everlasting space.
Undivorced from guilt, I must divorce myself from life, in
this setting part of time.
Not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but
because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I’ve sinned
only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams,
a new father, a new home.
Perhaps I shall rise at another time, though I lie down in
darkness and have my light in ashes.
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