Stoner

by John Williams

His lips were tingling and his fingertips were numb; he walked as if he were asleep, yet he was intensely aware of his surroundings.

he conceived himself changing in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change

he and his parents were becoming strangers;

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did

you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t,

“And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm.

we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive—because we have to.”

I abandoned the child I was, just to survive the horror of it.

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing.

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.

Finch had been allowed, in his spare time, to attend Columbia University, where he, too, had managed to fulfill the requirements necessary for a doctorate,

he had known at the University at Columbia the kind of security and warmth that he should have been able to feel as a child in his home, and had not been able to, and he was unsure of his ability to find those elsewhere.

!

He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.

His eyes burned from their concentration upon dim texts, his mind was heavy with what it observed, and his fingers tingled numbly from the retained feel of old leather and board and paper;

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.

Stoner became aware that he was in the presence of a bluff so colossal and bold that he had no ready means of dealing with it.

Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason

For a moment he was silent. Then reluctantly he said, “Edith, if you want to talk about this—” “No!” she said; there was an edge of fear in her voice. “There’s nothing to talk about. Nothing at all.”

What did you expect? he thought again.