The next passage is from the novel Stoner,
which concerns a man raised on a farm, who suddenly discovered,
when he was in college, a love for literature
and devoted the rest of his life to teaching.
He was a professor.
In the eyes of the world, he might have
been thought to be a failure.
In the eyes of the reader of Stoner,
I hope he is not thought to be so.
He had an ordinary life.
He married, rather badly.
Had a daughter whom he loved, and one love affair with a girl
named Katherine, who also was a scholar.
At the age of 65, he discovers that he is dying.
He dies during the year of his retirement.
As he is dying, he thinks of his life
and what it has meant to him.
He is at his home, and these are the last moments
of Stoner's life.
"The pain came upon him with a suddenness
and an urgency that took him unprepared, so that he almost
cried out.
He made his hands loosen up on the bedclothes
and willed them to move steadily to the night table.
He took several of the pills, and put them in his mouth,
and swallowed some water.
A cold sweat broke upon his forehead,
and he lay very still until the pain lessened.
He heard the voices again.
He did not open his eyes.
Was it Gordon?"
A friend of his.
"His hearing seemed to go outside his body and hover
like a cloud above him, transmitting to him
every delicacy of sound, but his mind could not exactly
distinguish the words.
The voice-- was it Gordon's?
Was saying something about his life.
And though he could not make out the words,
could not even be sure that they were being said, his own mind,
with the fierceness of a wounded animal, pounced
upon that question.
Mercilessly, he saw his life as it must appear to another.
Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure
that his life must appear to be.
He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship
that might hold him in the race of mankind.
He had had, in his life, two friends, one of whom
had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom
had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks
of the living that--
he had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion
of marriage.
He had had that too, and he had not known what to do with it,
and it had died.
He had wanted love, and he had had love,
and had relinquished it, had let it go
into the chaos of potentiality.
Katherine, he thought, Katherine.
And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one.
Yet he knew-- he had always known--
that for most of his life, he had been an indifferent one.
He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity
that was entire.
He had found compromise in the assaulting diversion
of triviality.
He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years,
he had found ignorance.
And what else?
He thought.
What else?
What did you expect?
He asked himself.
He opened his eyes.
It was dark.
Then he saw the sky outside, the deep, blue black of space,
and the thin glow of moonlight through a cloud.
It must be very late, he thought.
It seemed only an instant ago that Gordon and Edith
had stood beside him in the bright afternoon.
Or was it long ago?
He could not tell.
He had known that his mind must weaken as his body wasted,
but he had been unprepared for the suddenness.
The flesh is strong, he thought, stronger than we imagine.
It wants always to go on.
He heard voices and saw lights, and felt the pain come and go.
Edith's face hovered above him.
He felt his face smile.
Sometimes, he heard his own voice speak,
and he thought that it spoke rationally,
though he could not be sure.
He felt Edith's hands on him, moving him, bathing him.
She has her child again, he thought.
At last, she has her child that she can care for.
He wished that he could speak to her.
He felt that he had something to say.
What did you expect?
He thought.
Something heavy was pressing upon his eyelids.
He felt them tremble, and then he managed to get them open.
It was light that he felt, the bright sunlight
of an afternoon.
He blinked and considered impassively
the blue sky and the brilliant edge of the sun
that he could see through his window.
He decided that they were real.
He moved a hand, and with the movement
he felt a curious strength flow through him, as if
from the air.
He breathed deeply.
There was no pain.
With each breath he took, it seemed to him
that his strength increased.
His flesh tangled, and he could feel
the delicate weight of light and shade upon his face.
He raised himself up from the bed
so that he was half sitting, his back supported by the wall,
against which the bed rested.
Now, he could see the out of doors.
He felt that he had awakened from a long sleep
and was refreshed.
It was late spring or early summer.
More likely early summer from the look of things.
There was a richness and a sheen upon the leaves of the huge elm
tree in his backyard.
And the shade it cast had a deep coolness
that he had known before.
A thickness was in the air, a heaviness that
crowded the sweet odors of grass, and leaf, and flower,
mingling them, and holding them suspended.
He breathed again, deeply.
He heard the rasping of his breath,
and felt the sweetness of the summer gather in his lungs.
And he felt also, with that breath he took,
a shifting somewhere deep inside him,
a shifting that stopped something and fixed his head so
that it would not move.
And then it passed, and he thought,
so this is what it is like.
It occurred to him that he ought to call Edith,
and then he knew that he would not call her.
The dying are selfish, he thought.
They want their moments to themselves, like children.
He was breathing again, but there
was a difference within him that he could not name.
He felt that he was waiting for something, for some knowledge,
but it seemed to him that he had all the time in the world.
He heard the distant sound of laughter,
and he turned his head toward its source.
A group of students had cut across the backyard lawn.
They were hurrying somewhere.
He saw them distinctly.
There were three couples.
The girls were long-limbed and graceful in their light summer
dresses, and the boys were looking at them
with a joyous and bemused wonder.
They walked lightly upon the grass,
hardly touching it, leaving no trace of where they had been.
He watched them as they went out of his sight,
where he could not see.
And for a long time after they had vanished,
the sound of their laughter came to him far and unknowing
in the quiet of the summer afternoon.
What did you expect?
He thought again.
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze.
He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure as
if it mattered.
It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy
of what his life had been.
Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness.
He could not see them, but he knew that they were there,
gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability
he could not see or hear.
He was approaching them, he knew,
but there was no need to hurry.
He could ignore them if he wished.
He had all the time there was.
There was a softness around him, and the languor
crept upon his limbs.
A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force,
and he felt the power of it.
He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
His head turned.
His bedside table was piled with books
that he had not touched for a long time.
He let his hand play over them for a moment.
He marveled at the thinness of the fingers,
at the intricate articulation of the joints as he flexed them.
He felt the strength within them and let
them pull a book from the jumble on the tabletop.
It was his own book that he sought,
and when the hand held it, he smiled
at the familiar red cover that had for a long time
been faded and scuffed.
It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten
and that it served no use.
And the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial.
He did not have the illusion that he would find himself
there in that fading print, and yet he
knew a small part of him that he could not deny
was there and would be there.
He opened the book, and as he did so, it became not his own.
He let his fingers riffle through the pages,
and felt a tingling as if those pages were alive.
The tingling came through his fingers
and coursed through his flesh and bone.
He was minutely aware of it, and he
waited until it contained him, until the old excitement that
was like terror fixed him where he lay.
The sunlight, passing his window, shone upon the page,
and he could not see what was written there.
The fingers loosened, and the book they had held
moved slowly, and then swiftly, across the still body,
and fell into the silence of the room."