Stoner

by John Williams

In a moment of silence, someone cleared his throat. Sloane repeated the lines, his voice becoming flat, his own again. “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” Sloane’s eyes came back to William Stoner, and he said dryly, “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”

He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love.

“But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?” Sloane asked. “Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.” Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?” “I’m sure,” Sloane said softly. “How can you tell? How can you be sure?” “It’s love, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”

“But bad as we are, we’re better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world. We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it; and that’s a triumph of natural virtue, or pretty damn close to it.”

A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.” He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. “The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”

When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh.

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.

Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.

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.

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.

He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

The smell of smoke from trash burning in back yards was held by the mist; and as he walked slowly through the evening, breathing the fragrance and tasting upon his tongue the sharp night-time air, it seemed to him that the moment he walked in was enough and that he might not need a great deal more.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

They made love, and talked, and made love again, like children who did not think of tiring at their play.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

“I suppose I thought I was too. Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper! It takes being in love to know something about yourself. Sometimes, with you, I feel like the slut of the world, the eager, faithful slut of the world. Does that seem proper to you?”

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”

Sometimes they would lift their eyes from their studies, smile at each other, and return to their reading; sometimes Stoner would look up from his book and let his gaze rest upon the graceful curve of Katherine’s back and upon the slender neck where a tendril of hair always fell. Then a slow, easy desire would come over him like a calm, and he would rise and stand behind her and let his arms rest lightly on her shoulders. She would straighten and let her head go back against his chest, and his hands would go forward into the loose robe and gently touch her breasts. Then they would make love, and lie quietly for a while, and return to their studies, as if their love and learning were one process.

“Bill, if we never have anything else, we will have had this week. Does that sound like a girlish thing to say?” “It doesn’t matter what it sounds like,” Stoner said. He nodded. “It’s true.” “Then I’ll say it,” Katherine said. “We will have had this week.”

and he watched with an immeasurable sadness their last effort of gaiety, which was like a dance that life makes upon the body of death.

He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.

Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love. But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago?—by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.