Stoner
by John Williams
(Vintage, 2003)
The important thing is to keep the tradition going because the tradition is civilization.
Page xiv.
In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.
Page 14.
If you think you ought to stay here and study your books, then that's what you ought to do.
Page 23.
Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study.
Page 25.
Gordon feels the first strength of virtue he's ever been allowed to feel; and he naturally wants to include the rest of the world in it, so that he can keep on believing.
Page 34.
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 b ack. 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.
Pages 35-36.
The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.
Page 36.
She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was almost sacred obligation.
Pages 53-54.
Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned that she would have duties toward her husband and family and that she must fulfill them.
Page 54.
So she grew up with a frail talent in the more genteel arts, and no knowledge of the necessity of living from day to day. Her needlepoint was delicate and useless, she painted musty landscapes of thin water-color washes, and she played the piano with a forceless but precise hand; yet she was ignorant of her own bodily functions, she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well-being of another.
Page 54.
Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.
Page 58.
As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. As he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture - as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.
Page 103.
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.
Page 115.
They had come to that pint in their life together when they seldom spoke of themselves or each other, lest the delicate balance that made their living together possible be broken.
Page 122.
The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything - the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars - seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself.
Page 185.
He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.
Page 186.
It was dark outside, and a spring chill was in the evening air. He breathed deeply and felt his body tingle in the coolness. Beyond the jagged outline of the apartment houses the town lights glowed upon a thin mist that hung in the air. At the corner a street light pushed feebly against the darkness that closed a round it; form the darkness beyond it the sound of laughter broke abruptly into the silence, lingered and died. 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 tht the moment he walked in was enough and that he might not need a great deal more.
Page 194.
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.
Page 199.
Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.
Page 202.
It takes being in love go know something about yourself.
Page 202.
He was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touché 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.
Pages 226-227.
Our habits of thinking about the nature of experience have determined our own expectations as radically as their habits of medieval man determined his.
Page 231.
Another part of him was drawn intensely toward that very holocaust from which he recoiled. He found within himself a capacity for violence he did not know he had: he yearned for involvement, he wished for the taster of death, the bitter joy of destruction the feel of blood. He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter disappointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible.
Page 254.
He seldom thought of the past or the future, or of the disappointments and joys of either; he concentrated all the energies of which he was capable upon the moment of his work and hoped that he was at last defined by what he did.
Page 258.
It was foolishness, he knew, but he did not protest; it would have been unkind to do so. It was little enough to undergo, if it would distract them all from the knowledge they could not evade.
Page 279.
He had not wish to die; but there were moments, after Grace left, when he looked forward impatiently, as one might look to the moment of a journey that one does not particularly wish to take. 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.
Page 281.
A new tranquility had come between them. It was a quietness that was like the beginning of love; and almost without thinking, Stoner knew why it had come. 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.
Page 282.
Mercilessly he saw his life as it must appear to another.
Page 284.
The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.
Page 286.
A group of students had cut across his back-yard lawn; they were hurrying somewhere. He saw them distinctly; there were three couples. The girls were long-limbed and graceful in their light summer dresses, and the boys were looking at them with a joyous and bemused wonder.
Page 287.