> Summer Read with Beth
> Setting: Jefferson, Mississippi
> Lena, pregnant, unmarried, walks from Alabama to Mississippi to find Lucas Burch, father of the child
> Lucas Burch, deadbeat, liar, runs from responsibility
> Byron Bunch, honorable man, loves Lena, respects her desire to find Lucas, but lies to postpone their meeting
>Gail Hightower, minister whose wife goes crazy and becomes promiscuous, he loses his church but refuses to leave town
> Joe Christmas.....mixed blood man, tragic trajectory of life in the south,kills Miss Burden and burns the house
> Mr & Mrs. McEachern: adopted Joe from orphanage, Mr. was ruthless, fundamentalist
>Miss Burden....spinster who wants to marry Joe Christmas and have him work on behalf of Negroes
> "Old Doc" Eupheus & Mrs. Hines.....Joe Christmas' grandparents, turns out Doc was the janitor who watched Joe at orphanage and tried to save him from going to home for black children
> p.5..."But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan...brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and un-smoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes." -----Amazing prose!
> p.108...."It was as though he had merely come there to be present at a finality, and the finality had now occurred and he was free again."
> p.109..."Lying in the single blanket upon the loosely planked floor of the sagging and gloomy cavern acrid with the thin dust of departed hay and faintly ammoniac with that breathless desertion of old stables, he could see through the shutterless window in the eastern wall the primrose sky and the high, pale morning star of full summer."......Lovely and so accurate re: the barn smell
> p.114...."He went on, passing still between the homes of white people, from street lamp to street lamp, the heavy shadows of oak and maple leaves sliding like scraps of black velvet across his white shirt."
> p. 114....."As from the bottom of a thick black pit he saw himself enclosed by cabinshapes, vague, kerosenelit, so that the street lamps themselves seemed to be further spaced, as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle, of and with the now ponderable night inseparable and one."
> p.115..."Now and then he could see them; heads in silhouette, a white blurred garmented shape; on a lighted veranda four people sat about a card table, the white faces intent and sharp in the low light, the bare arms of the women glaring smooth and white avove the trivial cards. 'That's all I wanted,' he thought, 'That dont seem like a whole lot to ask.' "......sums up the disparity of the races
>Title: p.116......"he could see the street down whicvh he had come, and the other street, the one which had almost betrayed him; and further away and at right angles, the far bright rampart of the town itself, and in the angle between the black pit from which he had fled with drumming heart and glaring lips. No light came from it, from here no breath, no odor. It just lay there, black, impenetrable, in its garland of Augusttremulous lights. it might have been the original quarry, abyss itself."..the light of August, contrasts, disparity
> p.123....."The dietitian was twentyseven...old enough to have to take a few amorous risks but still young enough to attach a great deal of importance not so much to love, but to being caught at it."
> Opinion of women: 1) p.125..."Her subsequent actions followed a kind of divination, as if the days and the unsleeping nights during which she had nursed behind that calm mask her fear and fury had turned her psychic along with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil.", p.168...It was the woman who, with a woman's affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions"..."There have been good women who were martyrs to brutes, in their cups and such. But what woman, good or bad, has ever suffered from any brute as men have suffered from good women."....Hightower to Byron, "Woman (not the seminary as he had once believed); the Passive and Anonmymous whom God had created to be not along the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too, which is truth or as near truth as he dare approach" .....How to describe Faulkner's real attitude about women?
> Vocabulary: 1)ratiocination: the process of exact thinking, a reasoned train of thought 2) perspicuous: : plain to the understanding especially because of clarity and precision of presentation 3) maculate: marked with spots, blotched, impure, besmirched
> p.130...."He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans"....love this
> p.169...."It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men."........Joe Christmas, had to harden self to survive
> p.203..."He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, 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 a speed were not necessary." ....amazing prose
> p.220..."Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets."
> p.230..."...;he seemed to flow into the dark kitchen: a shadow returning without a sound and without locomotion to the allmother of obscurity and darkness. "
> Phases of relationship between Joe and Miss Burden: 1) strangers having sex 2)invited guest, dinner on the table 3) She tried to get Joe to marry her and work on behalf of Negroes......"during the first phase it had been as thought he were outside a house where snow was on the ground, trying to get into the house; during the second phase he was at the bottom of a pit in the hot wild darkness; now he was in the middle of a plain where there was no house, not even snow, not even wind."
> p.262..."And when he thought of that other personality that seemed to exist somewhere in physical darkness itself, it seemed to him that what he now saw by daylight was a phantom of someone whom the night sister had murdered and which now moved purposeless about the scenes of old peace, robbed even of the power of lamenting."
> p.270..."I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice."..how true!
> p.296..."It was as if the very initial outrage of the murder carried in its wake and made of all subsequent actions something monstrous and paradoxical and wrong, in themselves against both reason and nature."
> p.318..."It is Tennyson.....Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.".......Faulkner's metaphors and similes are magical!
> p.331....found it amusing that Faulkner referenced "the sound and fury..."
> p.339.."...the street that ran for thirty years"....great concept
> p.341..."...it is the happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate"...how true
> p.367..."...like all Protestant music. It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself. Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it.l Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear; their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable. And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another?"
> p.391...Hightower refuses to lie for Joe Christmas and create an alibi....why? Not clear to me
> p.423..."It seems like a man can just about bear anything. he can even bear what he never done. He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear. He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn't do it. He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking bnack wont do him any good."....Byron as he begins to leave Jefferson...and then doesn't
> p.449..."Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the minister." ....Joe Christmas' last desperate act
> p.466...."He can remember how when he was yong, after he first came to Jefferson from the seminary, how that fading copper light would seem almost audible, lika a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting, out of which they would presently come. Already, even before the falling horns had ceased, it would seem to him that he could hear the beginning thunder not yet louder than a whisper, a rumor, in the air."....Hightower
> p. 483..."Boys. Because this. This is beautiful. Listen. try to see it. Here is that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which makes heroes. That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand facwes before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself......It's too fine, too simple, ever to have been invented by white thinking."
> p.486..."Already he can feel the two instants about to touch: the one which is the sum of his life, which renews itself between each dark and dusk, and the suspended instant out of which the 'soon' will presently begin. When he was younger, when his net was still too fine for waiting, at this moment he would sometimes trick himself and believe that he heard them before he knew that it was time."...Hightower
> p.487..."He sees himself a shadowy figure among shadows, paradoxical, with a kind of false optimism and egoism believing that he would find in that part of the Church which most blunders, dreamrecovering, among the blind passions and the lifted hands and voices of men, that which he had failed to find in the Church's cloistered apotheosis upon earth. It seems to him that he has seen it all the while: ;that that which is destroying the Church is notr the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat, and doom. He seems to see the churches of the world like a rampart, like one of those barricades of the middleages planted with dead and sharpened stakes, against truth and against that peace in which to sin and be forgiven which is the life of man.".............the point of the entire novel.
LibraryThing Review: This is the third novel of Faulkner's that I have read and it is absolutely flawless! The prose begs to be read aloud as poetry throughout the book, the story is fascinating in and of itself and also historically intriguing, and the characters are deeply engaging. Faulkner's deeply Southern story is thought-provoking and engaging. Just to tease prospective readers, consider a pregnant girl who walks from Alabama to Mississippi to find her lover, the minister who cannot bring himself to overcome his past, the illegitimate boy named Christmas whose destiny seems written in stone, and the heroic Byron Burch.....and that just names a few of the wonderful characters in this novel.
As is true of many great writers, Faulkner's writing can be challenging, but believe me, it is well worth the effort!
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