musings

Faulkner, or Three Things to Love About As I Lay Dying

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

Last summer, I agreed to my friend Jacqui’s challenge to read 15 Classics in 15 Weeks. I’ve not kept pace, but I have persisted — and today I finished William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

I picked it for two reasons: one, because I was reading Hemingway, and as I recall the two crossed words now and again, and two, because it is told stream-of-consciousness, and I thought it might warm me up for James Joyce’s Ulysses. (As I’m writing this, I realize how poorly read I am: I’m not sure these connections make any sense at all, since I am making them all second- and third-hand.)

At any rate, I enjoyed Faulkner a great deal, although the story and characters aren’t particularly lovely or lovable. That’s part of the genius, I reckon …

And so, Three Things to Love About As I Lay Dying:

  • The Family. The Bundrens are quite the lot. Simple and canny, ugly and magnificent, pitiful and hard-as-nails. You can’t help but pull for them, even though at times they don’t seem to have a lick of sense — like their neighbors, you feel you must help them, even as you shake your head. They muddle along and survive. They persist.
  • The Method. The story unfolds character-by-character, just as it unfolds to their individual minds and senses. Stream-of-consciousness isn’t always easy to follow, but Faulkner makes it fascinating, and each character’s inner workings sing clear and true, if not always in harmony with the others.
  • The Time and The Place. How best to drink from the water bucket. How to get a frightened mule out of a burning barn. How to attempt a river crossing with the bridge out, and how to find woodworking tools lost in the flood. How two drowned mules roll and wash up on a river’s bend. Faulkner describes country life in loving and stark detail.

Next up: Homer’s The Odyssey, then Joyce’s Ulysses.

Lest Ye Be Judged

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

O, we of little faith! We have brought this upon ourselves. Had we but faith the size of a mustard seed, we could tell this weather system to pass over us, and it would.

Then again, if we really hate snow so much, what business have we dwelling in Minnesota?

The radio was abuzz on the morning commute: snow would start by 9 a.m. and last through the day. At noon, the grey skies were portentous but still — no solitary flake drifting earthward, much less the white blanketing predicted. I sat in my office, revising, when a familiar sound penetrated the window: a persistent, patterned echo, like a stadium vendor practicing in empty stands. The street preacher.

I look out the window. He stands before Northrop Auditorium, facing the Mall, in a dark coat, gloves and stocking cap, right hand clasped sincerely to his breast, left hand pointing skyward, a living icon of the north, writ in wool and windburned flesh instead of water and crushed stone. I’ve heard him before — he shouts salvation with the fire and brimstone of one saved and relentlessly saving, with the rhythm of a carnival barker. Two fellows stand a step or two behind him, similarly dressed. They are always behind him, always similarly dressed. Are they security, or there to work the crowd? I don’t know — none gather, and I’ve never seen anyone stop to talk or raise a question. Perhaps they put him up to it.

Ah, well. It’s not the first time he’s preached his sermon here. Students hurry past, and I return to my computer.

Minute pass, but not many. Through the window, the light changes, and I look out to a haze of snow blurring grey sky and ground. The preacher shouts, his hand raised to the heavens as if in vindication. I hear only the echoes and imagine the words: Ye sinners, the Lord thy God shall bury thee and thy iniquities! He shall cleanse thy broken world; He shall blanket thy blackest sin in the pure white of salvation!

The wind picks up as he rails. Pedestrians, hatted, hooded and hunched, hustle past without looking up. In a few moments, the Mall is empty, save a few last straggling souls. Then there are none. His voice resounds in the stony silence. He shakes his fist at the skies.

This Could Be Our Unraveling

/ J. Thorp / 3 Comments

“In the end, all of us are paying a price for this home mortgage crisis. And all of us will pay an even steeper price if we allow this crisis to deepen — a crisis which is unraveling homeownership, the middle class, and the American Dream itself. But if we act boldly and swiftly to arrest this downward spiral, every American will benefit.”

— President Barack Obama, in prepared remarks
about his plan to combat the U.S. home mortgage crisis.

I want to be hopeful. I want to be a “glass is half full” kind of guy. But we are already spending a trillion or so dollars, ostensibly to rejuvenate the economy, but perhaps more accurately to preserve a lifestyle, an image of what it means to middle class in America.

Unraveling the American Dream? It used to be that the American Dream was bought with blood, sweat and cash, not credit. It used to be about having a little place to call your own — nothing too fancy, mind you …

My own American Dream started to unravel that moment during my junior year at Yale when I decided to put a stereo and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger on my Visa. Up to that point, that card had been an emergency ticket to get home to Michigan. For years after that, the card was a crutch, and the last several years have been spent painstakingly stitching that dream back together.

I don’t see anything in all this spending that changes our collective perspective on living within our means. On the contrary, it appears that government is charging up a storm so we feel confident enough to do the same.

I’m worried, friends. The best-case scenario is that the global economy turns around — which I fear will underscore the idea that we can spend our way to financial freedom. I fear we will emerge more confident than ever that the economic masters of the universe will protect us.

And that could be our unraveling …