Riding on the Storm

Having completed my volume of collected essays, 2014 to 2017, I determined I needed to re-access my original purpose in writing this blog. I first conceived it as a place where I, along with others, could post writing in progress, and contributors could offer each other constructive criticism in a friendly atmosphere. Yet it didn't evolve along those lines. Rather, it evolved into a place where I alone have posted work in progress (along with some finished work), and though I've received a lot of interest in the blog, I've received relatively little criticism, and no submissions from other writers. So on the one hand it's been successful in attracting a readership, while on the other it hasn't worked out as I first intended.

As a result I've decided to change the format to one more logical, and I hope more enjoyable for the reader. I've decided to publish my books here one chapter (or essay, or poem, respectively) at a time, and delete the old when I post the new. I'll post the new work every week, on Thursday evening whenever possible. Otherwise, I 'll post as close to that time as I can.

I'm changing the format primarily so people can read my completed works without having to buy them. I believe the novels are worthy of more exposure than they've received, and in serializing the new work of essays, when it comes out, I hope to interest people in that book as well. I believe a writer must focus on writing in order to produce work of real value, and in making that attempt I've been unable to devote significant time to promotion. Thus, the books have had only limited exposure. All I hope is that readers will enjoy the work enough to buy a copy for themselves, and/or recommend it to others.

Those who do find these works of interest can buy them from Amazon, as well as from many other online booksellers in paperback, or on Amazon Kindle, at the very reasonable price of $3.00

Thank you all for your continuing interest,

Brent

21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

"The Broken World," Prologue

In order for the reader to understand this story, a few words must be said about a family and the patriarch of this family who died nearly fifty years ago. In many ways he was a typical American man. He was extremely frustrated, and I have rarely known an American man who wasn’t deeply frustrated in one way or another.
Although he died a material success, after a long marriage and fathering five children, in the end he was bitterly unhappy. And the truth is that to his last days, he didn’t really know why he felt that way. Of course, in this he also wasn’t particularly unusual. Vast numbers of men go to their graves bitterly unhappy, without ever really understanding the reasons. If Michael O’Connor was unusual at all, it was only in the extent of his potential and in the corresponding violence of his disillusionment.
He was born in 1903 on a Wyoming sheep ranch owned by his father, Patrick O’Connor, an Irish immigrant. The place was twenty thousand of the most desolate and windswept acres in all creation, along the Outlaw Trail, near the Hole in the Wall.
Of the three sons in the family, the eldest, Patrick Jr., was the father’s favorite. He had earned that honor by becoming a champion bull rider, something his father admired, and by repressing his own identity and mimicking his father in everything he did. This was the best way of winning approval, because there was no one the old man admired as much as himself.
Patrick Sr. had arrived from Ireland in the 1880s already a hostile man. His true occupation in life was cursing fate, the weather, God, his misfortune at having the two younger sons who didn’t remind him of himself, and his inability to keep a water pipe from freezing or to shave out of a frozen bucket.
He had fled Skibbereen, Ireland after murdering a tax collector during mass evictions, and this was why he was willing to resign himself to a life of obscurity on the Wyoming plains and why he was inwardly always back in Ireland, reliving old vendettas. The death of his wife after the birth of their youngest son, James, was his final proof of God’s indifference.

When the three brothers weren’t digging sheep out of snowdrifts in fifty-below-zero weather, they were enduring their father’s endless diatribes; and in the few moments he wasn’t in a violent rage, he was incessantly praising Patrick and belittling Michael and James, essentially for being someone other than himself. And yet beneath all of his colossal egotism, he secretly considered himself a failure.
Especially during the endless winters, their house was a prison, a tyranny in a tempest of blinding snow; and Michael realized when he was young that in order to survive, he had to escape. So he stayed up long hours studying, only to roll over in the morning to the sound of his father pounding a pot and shouting, “Get up, my lovely scholar, or I’ll pour the hot oatmeal over your precious head!”
It turned out that Michael had a photographic memory; and by the time he was sixteen, he could recite much of Shakespeare and other, classical works, including the Iliad and Odyssey. He dreamed of being a professional actor, but he realized it would be more practical to study medicine, and with tenacity so ferocious it was almost self-destructive, he eventually achieved, at the age of twenty-six, the nearly unheard of for an immigrant rancher’s son, a scholarship to Cornell University.
When his father heard the news, he grunted indifferently and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll find some way to make a failure out of it.”
And sure enough, as though his father had cursed him with those words, it came to naught. It was 1929, the stock market crashed, and the bank that held his scholarship fund failed.
This was Michael’s proof of God’s indifference, and it became his lifelong justification for vindictiveness, a violent temper and self-absorption that bordered on outright narcissism. In short, although he detested his father, through some sort of twisted alchemy, he eventually became a carbon copy of him.
When his father finally died of his own spleen and got his chance to have a few choice words with God, Patrick Jr. inherited the ranch.
This new lord of the manor, of course, accepted their father’s judgment that he himself was the only success in the family, but he was threatened by Michael’s potential, so he played the tyrant even more than his father had.
God, the bitter memories Michael had of those days! The endless struggle to drag sheep out of snowdrifts in the dead of night in arctic temperatures! The wind that stabbed so brutally that he cursed and begged God just to let him die and get it over with!
And maybe some of his inner demons came to him out of those snow-blind nights, but the truth was more straightforward than that, although, again, Michael never understood it himself.
I was told that as an old man, he broke down crying once when he heard a father say a few words in praise of his son. Michael pretended that his eyes were irritated, but everyone could see that he was crying. All he felt was a profound isolation that came up in him suddenly, and he saw those empty expanses of snow and nothing more, because he couldn’t make the connection, couldn’t consciously comprehend the source of his pain. It would have been too much for him, and so he kept it buried.
Finally, when he couldn’t take another moment of his elder brother’s hostility, he took the one hundred and thirty-five dollars he had managed to save, said goodbye to his brother James, and simply walked away.
That was in 1932, the start of the Depression, and the only work he could find was as an itinerant sheep rancher. When he occasionally got to town, in Cheyenne or Denver or Tucson, he acted in amateur theater; but that was the extent to which he fulfilled the promise of his life that had once been so high. He wandered from place to place, working until he couldn’t stand it anymore and then moving on again.
In a theater in Santa Fe, Michael met his future wife. She was attracted by his intelligence and his classic Irish wit and charm, but he felt they were too poor to marry. At last he realized that he wasn’t getting any younger and his chances for making money weren’t getting any better, so he gave in, and they were married in 1935.
Her name was Amelia, and the ceremony was in a white adobe church near the Arizona border with Mexico, under a blistering sun, and they spent their honeymoon in a shack without running water. Michael worked for a while in a machine shop in Tucson, under a tin roof, where he almost died of sunstroke. Then they moved to Gallup, New Mexico, and lived for several years in a converted chicken coop. In Gallup, Amelia taught English to Navaho children; and Michael worked for a despotic old rancher named Gallagher, whom he referred to as “a man of truly low caliber.”
Amelia was from a family of ranchers and miners in South Dakota. Her people had arrived in a covered wagon and built the first wooden frame house in the state. Her grandfather had known Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and had once seen Crazy Horse riding with a group of braves not far from Deadwood.
A practical, religious woman, with strict moral principles and a strong work ethic, she might have been at home in Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, but that was only one side of her personality, for she also loved literature, foreign cultures, history, and Pueblo Indian art and was in general quite educated for a “frontier” woman of her generation. There was a quality in her that was innately refined. She didn’t seem to be the daughter of an isolated miner, a young woman who had lived in remote and difficult circumstances. Instead, she gave the impression of having grown up in a cultured family.
It was this side of her, the creative, intellectual side, that was attracted to Michael and that set her apart from her stolid, unimaginative parents. Although she had been the one to pursue him, Michael had gotten the better end of the deal. She loved him unconditionally, while his feelings toward her were more ambivalent. By the time they met, he already had the air of a man settling for things in life, a man whose dreams were prematurely behind him. And yet in his own way, he did love her, as much as a man who is terrified of his feelings can love anyone.
When World War II came, Michael took the civil service examination and scored so highly that he was immediately hired by the Park Service and made much better money than he had sheep ranching. But he had to travel all over the Southwest, and sometimes he was away for many weeks at a time, performing resource surveys on public land.
In 1943, to his own tremendous surprise, he was hired as the director of personnel at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Essentially, this meant that he did background checks on new employees, verified academic credentials and otherwise kept track of records, and so forth. His hiring had been largely due to his remarkable memory; he could recall precisely every name, face, and resume he ever examined. Also, his personal security clearance came up perfectly clean. There was no information about him at all except for the record of his admission to Cornell, and mostly because of office politics, this turned out to be a great advantage, and he became the only person in a senior position at the laboratory without a college degree.
And so in late 1945, he found himself standing amid the pyroclastic glass at the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb had been detonated. He had the highest-level security pass and out of curiosity decided to visit the site. Until then, he hadn’t faced the implications of the work he had come to almost haphazardly in life, and he became deeply depressed. He had wanted to be a doctor or an actor. Now he was not sure what he had become. It was a time of soul-searching that was nearly intolerable for a man with an already unbearable amount of disappointment and pain. For months afterward it was difficult for him to sleep, and he had the first of a long series of strokes that would eventually end his life.
During the 1950s, he moved from Los Alamos to Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, and he became increasingly disillusioned. Although he loathed Stalin, he was not as anti-Communist as he had been anti-Nazi, and the McCarthy hearings left him fearing the loss of American civil liberties. As an Irishman, he was adamantly opposed to all forms of empire, what he was afraid the United States was becoming, but by then he felt too old to alter his course in life. He had five children, a son and four daughters to bring up, and he kept his misgivings largely to himself.
In later years he could still be witty, even charming at times in public, but at home he had taken to drunken tirades and black depressions. The darker side of his nature increasingly took possession of him. With four teenagers at home, sex was a subject so forbidden that the merest allusion to it drove him to fury, and he made it clear that all of his children were a disappointment to him. As far as he was concerned, none of them had inherited his intellect or reflected his former potential. He was especially cruel to his son Ryan, whom he called “a failure in waiting,” and to his daughter Mara, who was a rebel.
In spite of his assertions to the contrary, she rivaled him, both in passion and brilliance; and she was the most infuriated by his tyrannical self-absorption. A vicious struggle ensued between them, which, along with her rejection of both scientific progress and spiritual faith, culminated in her taking cyanide at the age of nineteen.
Her death was a fatal blow to Michael, who really did love her but didn’t know how to deal with his own complex emotions of frustration and fear.
He took to sitting up late at night drinking whiskey, reciting lines from the tragedies and having long, bitter arguments with his dead daughter. At those times no one dared to get near him, not even Amelia, who had done everything she could to bring him out of his despair.
On the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he had his final stroke. And for all his intelligence, on the day he died, he didn’t understand himself any better than when he had walked away from his father’s ranch, almost thirty years earlier.
One night shortly before his death, his daughter Cait heard him reciting Dylan Thomas in the darkness, in a trembling voice.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And rage he did. Rage, despair, and self-hatred were his father’s gifts to him and the gifts that he handed down to his own children; and in spite of anything else a father does, no legacy is so enduring.



Brent Hightower
Copyright 2008 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
Cover Image, Zdzislaw Beksinski




03/07/18

Note after serialization of entire novel:

This is the final chapter of my novel, The Broken World. I want to thank all of you for taking the time to read it. I've had about 7,000 hits on the blog while serializing it, enough to make me feel it was worth the while. I'll begin serializing my second novel, Ode to Belladonna, sometime in March. Meanwhile, I'm compiling my first collection of poems, which may take another year of more, and I'll publish some of those poems here as well, along with those new essays I feel are of any value. Again, thanks for all of the up-votes, and the appreciative comments regarding my novel. It makes it All a pleasure for me!

Yours,

Brent

The Mysterious Phage

I'm not a biologist, but I found this book to be strangely intriguing nevertheless. It delves into life at the micro level more interesting to me than most works of science fiction. The phage, it seems, is a remarkable bit of life that may or may not actually be alive, depending on how one defines the concept of life. The aspect of the book that was most engrossing was the way in which these creatures invade larger host organisms, and then, like the key to some cosmic lock, turn the host's DNA towards their own purposes. The first of these purposes is, of course, self-replication, but that's just the start of the strange odyssey of the phage.

If the invasion of a living host organism seems macabre, it must be said that these entities are also responsible for much of the genetic innovation underpinning the evolving process of life. So these infinitely small, and incomprehensibly multitudinous creatures, both destroy life and bring forth new life in the process. So if I understand the thrust of this book correctly, admittedly a stretch for a layman such as myself, it seems the phage is a sort of cross between a magician and an engineer, recreating and redefining life towards it's own elaborate and mysterious ends. The process it uses to accomplish this task is what the book is about and it is indeed the stuff of real life science fiction.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2017 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf

Moment's of Being is a unique and frightening book, but it isn't the kind of fright generated for effect - the smoke and mirrors of the horror writer's game - but genuinely frightening - partly because the substance of the book is not in the least gotten up to entertain you. Instead, it is a work in which the acutely sensitive instrument of Ms. Woolf's mind is set to work ferreting out the essence of life's meaning, and her effort was subtle enough that it wasn't until sometime after reading the book that I understood it. It needed time to sink into my consciousness, but once it had done so the effect was profound. I felt that something in it had both skirted the boundaries of human understanding and touched the root of my being. It carried my beyond the boundary of the unknown.

The book is hard to classify - being neither memoir, fiction, essay, nor philosophical treatise - it instead a bit of all these things. The frightening aspect of the book lies in the spiritual realization it achieves at first slowly, almost prosaically. Only bit by bit do we realize when Ms. Woolfe looks into a room she doesn't see just its furnishings, or even just characters within, but spiritual entities of great mystery. Her analysis of character penetrates to the very essence of the people in her book (including herself) and what she discovers is mixed, but on the whole it is a revelation of both her life and theirs to be shockingly insensate to the profound mystery unfolding about them, and least of all are they aware that they themselves represent the heart of that mystery. Things here presenting themselves as established fact gradually are seen to mean nothing at all. Relationships at first first substantial reveal themselves to be superficial - so much so they acquire the insubstantiality of smoke and mirrors, until the reader is left wondering if anything in their lives has any meaning at all.

The very limited action of the book is set in a very limited physical world - mostly in the narrator's own home and once on a trip to the beach.. What we don't see is what we see in so much fiction: action, mystery, staged horror, or romance. The character's seemingly prosaic lives and commonplace relationships are what gradually form the horror of the book. It is that their relationships are so utterly, so commonplace and tragically devoid of meaning, of anything really substantial at all, and by implication that this is what so much of our own lives, of our seemingly precious time is wasted and lost in endless banality.

Only occasionally, very occasionally, is this alienation cutting deeper then a knife relieved by flashes of great insight and revelation. Amid the commonplace events, like scattered stars in and eternally vast night, these moments of true being come to us, moments of profound insight or communion. Life is, in these amazing but all too brief moments, as we would like it to be. Life is buoyant, is ebullient, is lit with the incandescence of enlightenment. To the narrator of the book these flashing moments of vision equal half a lifetime of the typical drudgery of life. To the reader with imagination such disillusionment and alienation is indeed a frightening thing to contemplate, and Ms. Woolf doesn't leave us with any solace, nor advise, nor optimism - nor even pessimism really - regarding this dark existential vision. She merely presents us with it and we alone are faced with the task of making life as meaningful as we can, of struggling for a life that doesn't pass us by, almost without our being aware of it.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2017 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.org

Down And Out in Paris and London

I've been looking forward to reading this book for a long time. This and "Homage to Catalonia" are two of Orwell's books I'd never gotten around to, so it was good to get my hands on this volume. After 1984, Animal Farm, and many of his essays, my expectations for this wok were very high and Down and Out didn't disappoint. It falls a little short compared to his great classics, particularly 1984. I love Orwell's prose style for it's clarity and concision, and in this book he develops some of the themes that later became the foundation of his genius - his great concern for human welfare, and a fascination with society in it's relation to the individual. This was one of the attractions of this book - seeing a genius at work on the development of his overriding themes.

"Down and Out" is an observation of life in the Parisian and London barrios of the early twentieth century that also conveys many of the larger cultural difference between Paris and London, and I found that fascinating. In the opening of the book Orwell sketches the Parisian barrios so well that (for better or worse) you feel you've been there with all the filth, the hardship, and the desperation. It seems that in Paris life under these conditions more than endures, in its peculiar way almost flourishes. So many great artists have emerged from the Parisian barrios, one sees them as almost an asset to society. Yet Orwell does not in any glorify such an existence. He's upfront about it's suffering and its great risk to one's survival.

The overall theme of the book, which is a work of fiction that reads like autobiography, contrasts such lives in Paris and London, respectively, and the conclusion is that if one were poor in Europe at the time, it would have been better for one's chances of survival to to be in London, but far better for one's spirit to be in Paris. In London one would have probably had less chance of dying outright from deprivation, but without an extraordinary stamina and imagination (as exhibited by one particularly clever character in the novel, a street artist) life would have been unendurable drudgery.

Orwell makes the point that lives of such hardship and hopelessness are unnecessary, and he addresses a little of that question directly, but as in his later work, fictitious revelation is used more than direct explanation. The virtue of the book is its detailed observation of life at the margins, its empathy for its subjects, and its manner of allowing you to live that life vicariously a life that, like it or not is the enduring condition of great multitudes of mankind. It gives a window onto a tragic and pervasive aspect of existence allowing you to experience it without having to pay the price inherent in living it.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2016 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Cold Mountain

This book came to me highly recommended, but I was tempted to give it less than two stars.

Somehow I did find my way to the end of the thing. That was some time ago and I don't remember any of it. All I remember is that it wasn't an easy journey. At times I remember thinking I would gladly trade my struggle to read this dense, tiresome, and incoherent prose for the hapless journey of its caricatured protagonist through the War ravaged South!

I won't attempt to recreate the story line here - there wasn't one. Such as it is, it could be summed up in one sentence, "A man find's his way home." So the "substance" of the novel has to do with an attempt to convey history, and the human condition, in an intriguing, poetical, and insightful manner. That is a noble aspiration. The problem is that the author completely in his effort to accomplish it.

That this book is held up as a noteworthy novel is an insult to the literary tradition of the American South, which has produced such great writers as Faulkner, O'Connor, and Tennessee Williams. It simply has nothing new to say about anything, and doesn't do so in the most pretentious, predictable, (and yet also nebulous and dreary) manner conceivable!

It's fame is not a negative testament to the incapacity of American writers - but to the ineptitude and corruption of current publishing and criticism - the state of which, is for the most part, a scandal and like this novel a disgrace.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2014 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
*Image public domain

A Balanced Look at Justinian and Theodora? (a review of Theodora Empress of Byzantium)

This novel was well researched and clearly written by an author steeped in the deep complexities of the Byzantine Age, but I had a real problem with his apparent intention to "rehabilitate" the reputation of Empress Theodora, regardless of almost any degree of moral ambiguity and contradiction. It seemed as though the author could find no consistent world-view - no clear lens through which to interpret the life of this woman; one of histories trans-formative figures.

In the author's defense he isn't alone in this difficulty. The tremendous moral, political, and cultural complexities of the Byzantine Age often afflict those who attempt to chronicle them with a deep confusion!

Although the dominant perspective of the novel is clearly Catholic/historical and attempts to present Theodora as a defender of the faith, at other points I felt as though the author were presenting her from a modern feminist perspective. At yet other times I felt as if he were defending her from the charge of relentless and single-minded cruelty, of ruthless tyranny, and doing so from the perspective of a purely Machiavellian pragmatism! And these are just the beginning of the unresolved contradictions in the book.

My problem is not that I can't envision a person of that complexity. There is, obviously, virtually no limit to the potential complexities of the human personality. A failure to delve deeply enough into that complexity is, in my opinion, the failing here. The mystery of Theodora, the subject of the book, has defeated him. Her life remains an enigma that simply resists his every attempt to make it conform to some handy modern concept, to put it in some "box" where a modern reader can glance at it, understand it, and turn away content that their essential world-view hasn't been disturbed - because the far deeper truth is that if you look at Theodora's life and you aren't both confounded and deeply disturbed then you simply haven't been paying attention.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2016 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Hypatia, Alexandria, and Holy War

I cannot give the author enough credit for writing such an enlightening account of the life of Hypatia based upon such limited historical resources. This was clearly a labor of love and the result of painstaking research.

I found the book to be enlightening in a number of ways - firstly, in the way Ms. Dzielska clearly illuminates a very complex historical era, so that it is approachable for any educated reader - secondly, in the manner she clearly introduces the reader to the neo-Platonic concepts Hypatia taught and represented with her life, and finally, the lucid manner in which she develops her case for the reasons Hypatia was murdered.

Hypatia of Alexandria is, in my opinion, a work of first-rate scholarship and literary artistry: I will not say anything regarding the book's conclusions and thereby possibly diminish the enjoyment of this book for the reader - only that I am not entirely convinced by the somewhat startling final thesis. Yet that reservation in no way diminishes either the solid factual foundation of her argument or the brilliance with which she presents it.

I would highly recommend this volume to anyone interested in late antiquity, in neo-Platonic philosophy, or the development of Christianity in Byzantium.

The Stranger

A Review of The Stranger by Albert Camus

It has been perhaps three years since I've read The Stranger, but the book left an indelible impression on me. The reason, I think, is that this under appreciated work addresses the most profound question of our times: the question of the narcissistic and anti-social personality disorders and their challenge to civilization. Beyond a doubt this was the question Camus was addressing here, and he was doing so long before these issues were in the forefront of psychological thought.

In his seemingly casual anticipation of the significance of these conditions and his realistic interpretation of their banal nature lies the work's misleadingly prosaic quality; yet under that seemingly tepid surface lies the horror of the human spirit disconnected from love.

This, along with the crystal clear prose that always characterized Camus, resulted in an understated novel that is a triumph of Western Literature.

Whatever our interpretation of the origins of these mental conditions, or our understanding of their meanings - whether it is the result of overpopulation, or of individualism vs. the collective good, or of simple genetics, or of some other factor - there is no doubt that this is the great question of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Hitler to Ghandi, from spirituality to science, from plutocracy to democracy, from frugality to materialism: human nature itself is the catalyist and human nature comes down to the individual.

Within this mystery of the individual, as much as that of society itself, lies the origin of the two world wars and all of the subsequent strife of the hyper-material age. We are trapped in a duality between survival and connection, between selfishness and transcendence, between life and death.

That "The Stranger" can be completely unmoved at his own mother's funeral, that he can exist isolated from any emotional connection and that he can eventually be led to murder without any more effort than a child is led to candy is the profound message of this novel. It is a condemnation of our increasing isolation from one another, from community, and from spirituality. It is a clarion call alerting us that an individualistic, impersonal, hyper-technical society not only produces these people, but perhaps even encourages them, and at times elevates them to positions of great power.

With the second world war in clear hindsight it was this towering quandary that clearly absorbed Camus in this work, and there is no more important question for a current reader to engage.

And so, seen in it's proper light, "the Stranger" is a riveting story of loveless alienation, spiritual meaninglessness, and of the inability of the individual to even understand what they are missing - the kind of existence that resulted in a Nazi Germany or a Soviet Russia, and of it's consequences. We must not allow our distance from this work in space and time to obscure the fact that it is still the central question of today. That was the gift Camus gave to us in The Stranger, and we should receive it with gratitude.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2012 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Light In August

A review of Light In August by William Faulkner:

In "Light in August," Faulkner achieves the highest standard of prose I have read in an American novel. There were passages I read over and over again, and I marveled at the sheer visionary concentration of the writing - at the author's ability to focus on a specific scene so clearly, so intently, that he brought me completely into his vision. The below description of nothing more than a wagon rolling down a country road, is a fine example:

"The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and ungreased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry sluggish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewiney silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much is this so that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape. . ."

It takes tremendous focus and commitment to create such evocative prose, and I have to admit that it took me many years to become patient enough, and reflective enough, to fully appreciate Faulkner for his descriptive brilliance. An equally great, or greater achievement of this novel, was in his commitment to portray human existence exactly as he saw it. There was really no social or political "agenda" in Faulkner's work at all, in my opinion, although some have made that claim. Instead, what I see, is a courageous and unflinching determination to portray his world with absolute fidelity, to hold a mirror up to life and human society, so that we might look at that image and draw our own conclusions about where society has succeeded and where it has failed.

This, in my estimation is a heroic and monumentally difficult thing to attempt, and not only does Faulkner attempt it in "Light In August," he achieves it admirably. As in the passage excerpted above, what I see in Faulkner's work is courage: the courage of a writer willing to face himself and to portray both his inner-impressions, and his external reality unflinchingly, with the deepest exertion towards absolute honesty. I can think of no higher praise for any writer, or any novel.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2013 by Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com