As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

saw that with Jewel she had just been pretending, but that it was between her and Darl that the understanding and the true love was.

saw that with Jewel she had just been pretending, but that it was between her and Darl that the understanding and the true love was.

I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

But then, when something like this happens, I reckon she is right and you got to keep after it and I reckon I am blessed in having a wife that ever strives for sanctity and well-doing like she says I am.

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.

And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

for it was worst then. I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream.

One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

“But I reckon I can talk him around,” he says. “A man’ll always help a fellow in a tight, if he’s got ere a drop of Christian blood in him.”