About Faulkner... and first paragraphs... three people put me on the spot today and asked me which opening paragraph is my favorite.  I had a hard time with that.  At first I thought it might be The Sound and the Fury, but that’s probably the one everybody remembers; so I decided to think about it some more... and then I remembered: 

“There was a man and a dog too this time.  Two beasts, counting Old Ben, the bear, and two men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which was in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible.”

So I’ve definitely settled on “The Bear” from Go Down Moses... at least until tomorrow.  

  

Well, I guess I can’t wait for tomorrow... Now I remember another story that has in it Sam Fathers... “The Old People,” and I guess maybe because I am one now, I should consider letting it be my favorite:

“At first there was nothing.  There was the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn, with the voices of the hounds converging somewhere in it and toward them.  Then Sam Fathers standing just behind the boy as he had been standing when the boy shot his first running rabbit with his first gun and almost with the first load it ever carried touched his shoulder and he began to shake, not with any cold.  Then the buck was there  He did not come into sight; he was just there, looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not only moving it but disseminating it, already running, seen first as you always see the deer, in that split second after he has already seen you, already slanting away in that first soaring bound, the antlers even in that dim light looking like a small rocking-chair balanced on his head.”

I knew the fifth or tenth time I read that paragraph, maybe sixty years before I was one of the old people, that here was a man who understood and respected the subjunctive mood when few other people in the American English speaking world did and that I probably was in love with him and should just give in and become an English teacher so I could have a reason to talk about how impossible it is to write the way he did.

I didn’t take a single picture today that I can even remotely relate to Sam Fathers or Boon Hogganbeck or Tennie’s Jim or William Faulkner... or the boy.  I’ll just go with the images I got today and wish I could ever in my lifetime get even one that would be as awesome as what Faulkner said about the boy and Sam Fathers: 

“Also, since he was nine now, he could understand that Sam could leave him and their days and nights in the woods together without any wrench. He believed that he and Sam both knew that this was not only temporary but that the exigencies of his maturing, of that for which Sam had been training him all his life some day to dedicate himself, required it.”

Wow!