it's the small things in life.

Normally, I don't like to post twice in one day, but I just re-read my favorite section of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and I can't help fall to my knees in the face of literary genius.


"He had a word for it too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. ...

I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a _____ and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse. ...

And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. ...

One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too."


And then I get the chills and have to close the book. Not because the book is anywhere close to being over (in fact, these words come only about 2/3 into the book), but because my fingers start to shake and I am reminded of how small my words really are.