Another way of saying what I was trying to say in that last post was captured in a paragraph I read this morning in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.Faulkner is speaking through the mouth of Anse (Pa). It is a horribly dysfunctional family (like most) with layers and layers of psychological drama. When one son seemed to go more nuts than the rest and another son raised the question of the sanity of his brother (after his brother burned down their host's barn and then was picking a fight when someone commented that his dead mother was stinking) his father said the following (in his Mississippi dialect):
Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
5 comments:
Absolutely! I laugh Faulkner, and my son fell in love with As I Lay Dying when he was 7 years old. He read it for a book report that the teacher would not accept because he it was not on her fourth-grade reading list. Go figure! What those kids were missing! Thanks for the trip down memory lane even it was not an intentional one.
PS. I have typos, too. I meant to say I love (not laugh) Faulkner. Actually, Faulkner does not leave a lot to laugh about; he is sort of a serious guy.
7 Years Old!? And he understood that book? Not and easy one to follow with his flight of conscientiousness style of writing.
Speaking of typos . . . consciousness is what I meant.
Re my then-7-year-old (Shane): I think he was willing to work at understanding it because of the character of Jewell and his horse -- he was fascinated with farms from the age of 3 until about 8 or 9. I don't think he understood all the social themes in Faulkner's work, especially since we spent very little time in the South, but he did understand the main ideas. (He was an odd kid; the following year he developed an affection for Kafka.) He had a head start: he taught himself to read at the age of 23 months and sped up after that; the University of Pittsburgh put him into first grade at its lab school when he was 3, so he was not an intellectual age 7, just a chronological one.
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