Reading of "The Town"
DATE: 5 June 1957
OCCASION: Local Public and University Community
TAPE: T-138
LENGTH: 5:20
Play the full recording:
William Faulkner:
There is a ridge; you drive on beyond Seminary Hill and
in time you come upon it: a mild unhurried farm road presently mounting to
cross the ridge and on to join the main highway leading from Jefferson to
the world. And now, looking back and down, you see all Yoknapatawpha in the
dying last of day beneath you. There are stars now, just pricking out as you
watch them among the others already coldly and softly burning; the end of
day is one vast green soundless murmur up the northwest toward the zenith.
Yet it is as though light were not being subtracted from earth, drained from
earth backward and upward into that cooling green, but rather had gathered,
pooling for an unmoving moment yet, among the low places of the ground so
that ground, earth itself is luminous and only the dense clumps of trees are
dark, standing dark and immobile out of it.
Then, as though at signal, the fireflies—lightning-bugs
of the Mississippi child's vernacular—myriad and frenetic, random and
frantic, pulsing; not questing, not quiring, but choiring as if they were
tiny incessant appeaseless voices, cries, words. And you stand suzerain and
solitary above the whole sum of your life beneath that incessant ephemeral
spangling. First is Jefferson, the center, radiating weakly its puny glow
into space; beyond it, enclosing it, spreads the County, tied by the
diverging roads to that center as is the rim to the hub by its spokes,
yourself detached as God Himself for this moment above the cradle of your
nativity and of the men and women who made you, the record and chronicle of
your native land proffered for your perusal in ring by concentric ring like
the ripples on living water above the dreamless slumber of your past; you to
preside unanguished and immune above this miniature of man's passions and
hopes and disasters—ambition and fear and lust and courage and abnegation
and pity and honor and sin and pride all bound, precarious and ramshackle,
held together by the web, the iron-thin warp and woof of his rapacity but
withal yet dedicated to his dreams.
They are all here, supine beneath you, stratified and
superposed, osseous and durable with the frail dust and the phantoms—the
rich alluvial river-bottom land of old Issetibbeha, the wild Chickasaw king,
with his Negro slaves and his sister's son called Doom who murdered his way
to the throne and, legend said (record itself said since there were old men
in the county in my childhood who had actually seen it), stole an entire
steamboat and had it dragged intact eleven miles overland to convert into a
palace proper to aggrandise his state; the same fat black rich plantation
earth still synonymous of the proud fading white plantation names whether
we—I mean of course they—ever actually owned a plantation or not: Sutpen and
Sartoris and Compson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and
Habersham and Holston and Stevens and De Spain, generals and governors and
judges, soldiers (even if only Cuban lieutenants) and statesmen failed or
not, and simple politicians and over-reachers and just simple failures, who
snatched and grabbed and passed and vanished, name, face and all. Then
the roadless, almost pathless perpendicular hill-country of McCallum and
Gowrie and Frazier and Muir translated intact with their pot stills and still
peaking only—speaking only the old Gaelic and not much of that, from Culloden to
Carolina, then from Carolina to Yokpatawpha still intact and still speaking not
much of anything except that they now called the pots "kettles" though the drink
(even I can remember this) was still usquebaugh; then and last on to where
Frenchman's Bend lay beyond the south—southeastern horizon, cradle of Varners and
ant-heap of the northeast crawl of Snopes.
And you stand there—you, the old man, already
white-headed (because it doesn't matter if they call your gray hairs
premature because life itself is always premature which is why it aches and
anguishes) and pushing forty, only a few years from forty—while there rises
up to you, proffered up to you, the spring darkness, the unsleeping darkness
which, although it is of the dark itself, declines the dark since dark is of
the little death called sleeping. Because look how, even though the last of
west is no longer green and all of firmament is now one unlidded studded
slow-wheeling arc and the last of earth-pooled visibility has drained away,
there still remains one faint diffusion, since everywhere you look about the
dark panorama you can still see them, faint as whispers: the faint and shapeless
lambence of dogwood blooming return loaned light to light as the phantoms
of candles would.
And you, the old man, standing there while there rises
to you, about you, suffocating you, the spring dark peopled and myriad, two
and two seeking never at all solitude but simply privacy, the privacy
decreed and created for them by the spring darkness, the spring weather, the
spring which an—which an American poet, a fine one, a woman and so she knows, called
girls' weather and boys' luck. Which was not the first day at all, not Eden
morning at all because girls' weather and boys' luck is the sum of all the
days: the cup, the bowl proffered once to the lips in youth and then no
more; proffered to quench or sip or drain that lone one time and even that
sometimes premature, too soon. Because the tragedy of life is, it must be
premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be
before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.
[end of recording]
