The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape.
already, he realised, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss.
Master / Finch / Stoner
Masters - "Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University? Mr. Stoner? Mr. Finch?" "I'll bet you haven't. Stoner, here, I imagine, see 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 - " "You'll protest you haven't thought of it. But you have, Beneath that bluff and hearty exterior there works a simple mind. To you, the institution is an instrument of good - to the world at large of course, and just incidentally to yourself. You see it as a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter; and you're the kindly old doctor who benignly pats their heads and pockets their fees."
"We give out the reasons." "but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive - because we have to. "
His dissertation
He wondered again at the essay, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marvelled 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.
Edith
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 an almost sacred obligation.
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 fulfil them.
Edith parents
Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment.
Middle marriage
And at times he felt that some closeness remained between them, a closeness which neither of them could afford to admit.
Solitude
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 to whiteness, which spread as far as he could se, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth.
Beyond the jagged outline of the apartment houses the town lights glowed upon a thin mist that hung in the air.
Love tears them apart
But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch's office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small centre of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm. He was vaguely conscious that he walked across the campus in the bright crisp heat of an early spring afternoon the dogwood trees along the sidewalks and in the front yards were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze; the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air.
Death
Edith- "Oh, Willy, You're all eaten up inside."
Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be.
It occurred to him that he ought to call Edith; and then he knew that he would not call her. The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.
The finders loosed, and the book they had held moved slowly and then swiftly across the still body and fell into the silence of room.
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