Janet and I are taking a day trip to Oxford tomorrow, so I thought I'd use some Faulkner for this week's Lit Bit. Yesterday I started re-reading my favorite Faulkner novel, Light in August. Here are two excerpts from early in the novel:
(Speaking of what would eventually become of a planing mill)
"But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan--gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stump-pocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly into red and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes."
(Regarding the rumors surrounding Reverend Hightower, a former minister)
"Byron listened quietly, thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but that it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind."
(Speaking of what would eventually become of a planing mill)
"But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan--gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stump-pocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly into red and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes."
(Regarding the rumors surrounding Reverend Hightower, a former minister)
"Byron listened quietly, thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but that it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind."
Coming from a small town, I can definately relate to the second bit. It is almost a recreational passtime to "spread the word" with some folks. By the way, I started Winesburge, Ohio last night. Only read the first three chapters though so I'm not really sure what to think yet.