Stoner

by John Williams

the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all,

to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.

His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.

He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration.

It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge,

it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth.

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.

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.”

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.

he felt that he had little to offer to himself and that there was little within him which he could find.

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 never went into that room that he did not glance at the seat he had once occupied, and he was always slightly surprised to discover that he was not there.

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

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

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

a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.

she wandered like a ghost into the privacy of herself, a place from which she never fully emerged.

He did not allow himself the easy luxury of guilt;

She was not always as she had been; and he thought now that he could perceive beneath the woman she had become the girl that she had been; he thought that he had always perceived it.

And like any traveler, he felt that there were many things he had to do before he left; yet he could not think what they were.

They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.

What did you expect? he asked himself.

What did you expect? he thought.

He was breathing again, but there was a difference within him that he could not name.

What did you expect? he thought again.