Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 315

--or so he thought, forgetting that victory or defeat both are bought at

the same exorbitant prices of change and alteration; one nation, one

world: young men who had never been farther from Yoknapatawpha County than

Memphis or New Orleans (and that not often), now talked glibly of street

intersections in Asiatic and European capitals, returning no more to

inherit the long monotonou endless unendable furrows of Mississippi

cottor, field- living now (with now a wife and next year a wife and child

and the year after that a wife and children) in automobile trailers or

G.I. barracks on the outskirts of liberal arts colleges, and the father

and now grandfather himself still driving the tractor across the gradually

diminishing fields between the long looping skeins of electric lines

bringing electric power from the Appalachian mountains, and the subterrene

steel veins bringing the natural gas from the Western plains, to the

little lost lonely farmhouses glittering and gleaming with automatic

stoves and washing machines and television antennae;

One nation: no longer anywhere, not even in Yoknapatawpha County, one last

irreconcilable fastness of stronghold from which to enter the United

States, because at last even the last old sapless indomitable unvanquished

widow or maiden aunt had died and the old deathless Lost Cause had become

a faded (though still select) social club or caste, or form of behavior

when you remembered to observe it on the occasions when young men from

Brooklyn, exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas

Universities, vended tiny Confederate battle flags among the thronged

Saturday afternoon ramps of football stadia; one world: the tank gun: cap-

tured from a regiment of Germans in an African desert by a regiment of

Japanese in American uniforms, whose mothers and fathers at the time were

in a California detention camp for enemy aliens, and carried (the gun)

seven thousand miles back to be set halfway between, as a sort of

secondary flying buttress to a memento of Shiloh and The Wilderness; one

universe, one cosmos: contained in one America: one towering frantic

edifice poised like a card-house.over the abyss of the mortgaged

generations; one boom, one peace: one swirling rocket-roar filling the

glittering zenith as with golden featherg, until the vast hollow sphere

of his air, the vast and terrible burden beneath which he tries to stand

erect and lift his battered and indomitable head-the very substance in

which he lives and, lacking which, he would vanish in a matter of

seconds~is murmurous with his fears and terrors and disclaimers and

repudiations and his aspirations and dreams