Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 297

carceration does man find the idleness in which to compose, in the gross

and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross

and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart); invisible and

impacted, not only beneath the annual inside creosote-and-whitewash of

bullpen and cell, but on the blind outside walls too, first the simple

mud-chinked log ones and then the symmetric brick, not only the scrawled

illiterate repetitive unimaginative doggerel and the perspectiveless

almost prehistoric sexual picture-writing, but the images, the panorama

not only of the town but of its days and years until a century and better

had been accomplished, filled not only with its mutation and change from

a halting-place: to a community: to a settlement: to a village: to a town,

but with the shapes and motions, the gestures of passion and hope and

travail and endurance, of the men and women and children in their

successive overlapping generations long after the subjects which had

reflected the images were vanished and replaced and again replaced, as

when you stand say alone in a dim and empty room and believe, hypnotised

beneath the vast weight of man's incredible and enduring Was, that perhaps

by turning your head aside you will see from the corner of your eye the

turn of a moving limb-a gleam of crinoline, a laced wrist, perhaps even

a Cavalier plume-who knows? provided there is will enough, perhaps even

the face itself three hundred years after it was dust-the eyes, two

jellied tears filled with arrogance and pride and satiety and knowledge

of anguish and foreknowledge of death, saying no to death across twelve

generations, asking still the old same unanswerable question three

centuries after that which reflected them had learned that the answer

didn't matter, or-better still-had forgotten the asking of it-in the

shadowy fathomless dreamlike depths of an old mirror which has looked at

too much too long;

But not in shadow, not this one, this mirror, these logs: squatting in the

full glare of the stump-pocked clearing during those first summers,

solitary on its side of the dusty widening marked with an occasional wheel

but mostly by the prints of horses and men: Pettigrew's private pony

express until he and it were replaced by a monthly stagecoach from

Memphis, the race horse which Jason Compson traded to Ikkemotubbe, old

Mohataha's son and the last ruling Chickasaw chief in that section, for

a square of land so large that, as the first formal survey revealed, the

new courthouse would have been only another of Compson's outbuildings had

not the town Corporation bought enough of it (at Compson's price) to

forefend themselves being trespassers, and the saddle-mare