Stoner

by John Williams

before William Stoner the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration.

“Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University? Mr. Stoner? Mr. Finch?” Smiling, they shook their heads. “I’ll bet you haven’t. Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive. The True, the Good, the Beautiful. They’re just around the corner, in the next corridor; they’re in the next book, the one you haven’t read, or in the next stack, the one you haven’t got to. But you’ll get to it someday. And when you do—when you do—

“It is an asylum or—what do they call them now?—a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent. Look at the three of us—we are the University.

“I suppose I’m doing it because it doesn’t matter whether I do it or not.

There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.”

the Grand Tour of Europe

He supposed that all men were as uncertain as he suddenly had become, and had the same doubts.

they spoke of the future and gravely thought of how they would fill it.

Stoner agreed at once—and told himself that things would be better once they were in a place of their own,

When he forced his help upon her, she became almost sullen, thinking herself to be humiliated.

Very soon Stoner realized that the force which drew their bodies together had little to do with love;

now we’ll have to bring somebody else in and find a new chairman for the department. It’s like it all just goes around and around and keeps on going. It makes you wonder.”

It seemed far away to him, and long ago; he could not reckon the changes that these few years had wrought.

They spent most of their lives apart; Edith kept the house, which seldom had visitors, in spotless condition. When she was not sweeping or dusting or washing or polishing, she stayed in her room and seemed content to do so. She never entered William’s study; it was as if it did not exist to her.

he said no more and hoped that his silence was less compromising than were his explanations.

His eyes were hot and dry, and he could not weep.

Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.

He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be.

no longer did it seem necessary to pretend to herself that she was ill or weak.

she seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so.

On these afternoons Stoner was usually in his study and could hear what the mothers said as they spoke loudly across the room, above their children’s voices. Once, when there was a lull in the noise, he heard Edith say, “Poor Grace. She’s so fond of her father, but he has so little time to devote to her. His work, you know; and he has started a new book . . .” Curiously, almost detachedly, he watched his hands, which had been holding a book, begin to shake.

the ‘skill of letters’ mentioned by Plato and Aristotle;

“I’m going to be very frank with you, Stoner,” Lomax said. His anger had quieted, and his voice was calm, matter of fact. “I don’t think you’re fit to be a teacher; no man is, whose prejudices override his talents and his learning.

He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something—even pain—to pierce him, to bring him alive.

he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered.

He wondered at the foolishness that drove men to do the things they did.

Her eyes, that he had thought to be a dark brown or black, were a deep violet. Sometimes they caught the dim light of a lamp in the room and glittered moistly; he could turn his head one way and another, and the eyes beneath his gaze would change color as he moved, so that it seemed, even in repose, they were never still.

“I used to see you standing there in front of the class, so big and lovely and awkward, and I used to lust after you something fierce. You never knew, did you?”

“In theory, your life is your own to lead. In theory, you ought to be able to screw anybody you want to, do anything you want to, and it shouldn’t matter so long as it doesn’t interfere with your teaching. But damn it, your life isn’t your own to lead.

like a dance that life makes upon the body of death.

He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken;

It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.

Grace had become almost motionless, as if she felt that any movement might throw her into an abyss from which she would not be able to clamber.

She lay motionless on her unmade bed, or sat motionless at her desk, and listened to the sounds that blared thinly from the scrollwork of the squat, ugly instrument on her bedside table, as if the voices, music, and laughter she heard were all that remained of her identity and as if even that were fading distantly into silence, beyond her recall.

Stoner came to realize that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.

The ghost of a smile came upon Finch’s face. “You have turned into an ornery old son-of-a-bitch, haven’t you?”

The value of friendship

He had Edith open the curtains on all the windows and would not let her close them, even when the afternoon sun, intensely hot, slanted into the room.

Experiencing the last natural light

He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.