Light in August

by William Faulkner

And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.

Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to.

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.

‘Because always,’ he thinks, ‘when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact.’

‘It is because a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.’

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

“And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as a honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”

His steady white shirt and pacing dark legs died among long shadows bulging square and huge against the August stars:

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.

The curse of the black race is God’s curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God’s chosen own because He once cursed him’.”

It’s like God sees that they find out what they need to know out of men’s lying, without needing to ask. And that they dont find out what they dont need to know, without even knowing they have not found it out. And so I dont know for sure what she knows and what she dont know.

Dont no other woman need to that is going to. I aint saying that it aint been women that has done most of the talking. But if you had more than mansense you would know that women dont mean anything when they talk. It’s menfolks that take talking serious. It aint any woman that believes hard against you and her. Because it aint any woman but knows that she aint had any reason to have to be bad with you, even discounting that baby. Or any other man right now. She never had to.