The Sound and the Fury

by William Faulkner

THERE IS A story told of a celebrated Russian dancer, who was asked by someone what she meant by a certain dance. She answered with some exasperation, ‘If I could say it in so many words, do you think I should take the very great trouble of dancing it?

but I went away

‘Did you ever try?’ I said. But Roskus was gone. Once more he was that self he had long since taught himself to wear in the world’s eye, pompous, spurious, not quite gross.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

Benjamin the child of mine old age held hostage into Egypt.

You know what I’d do if I were King? she never was a queen or a fairy she was always a king or a giant or a general

an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh

to speak without altering your appearance at all you wont do it under these conditions it will be a gamble and the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final

every man is the arbiter of his own virtues

the random and tentative sun.

‘Tell um de good Lawd don’t keer whether he smart er not. Don’t nobody but white trash keer dat.’

He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice. With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman’s single soprano: ‘Yes, Jesus!’