Fox

by Joyce Carol Oates

Instilling a fatal self-doubt in the prepubescent soul is pathetically easy to do, like the kind of brain surgery once executed with an ice pick.

In the adult world beyond school, Mr. Fox tells his students, it is routine to try again, to try many times. It is not realistic to be judged on a single effort.

He cut something of a glamorous-bachelor figure, in life: Francis Harlan Fox. Zwender has studied photos, and has interviewed witnesses to the life, or to that fraction of the life that Fox revealed to others. But in a man’s private quarters it’s the condition of a venetian blind, or the stale-sour smell of his bedding, or the contents of his personal computer that most reveal his soul.

That is freedom: the cessation, not of love, but of caring if there is love.

For what is reading but the dissolution of the merely personal into the impersonal, a triumph of mental concentration.

There is something smug and condescending about someone who is certain that he is saved and you are not.

book is like a little door, I can open the door and climb through, and nobody can follow me.”