una dura retrospectiva, escribe williams

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of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that...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 and 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.

when is a life worth living, pregunta williams

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.--escribe John Williams, en Stoner. Leí la novela hace un año y, porque seguía pensando en ella, quise buscar en el blog cuáles citas había subido. Me sorprendió descubrir que ninguna. Esta semana entera se la dediqué al libro de Williams. Mañana, cuelgo el fragmento que, entre todos los golpes que componen el libro, quizás es el más duro.

pedagogía, piensa williams

He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which is simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man.--escribe John Williams, en Stoner. Leí la novela hace un año y, porque seguía pensando en ella, quise buscar en el blog cuáles citas había subido. Me sorprendió descubrir que ninguna. 

academia as tragic dwelling, dixit williams

It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive - because we have to. --escribe John Williams, en Stoner. Leí la novela hace un año y, porque seguía pensando en ella, quise buscar en el blog cuáles citas había subido. Me sorprendió descubrir que ninguna. Así que por los próximos días, acá estaré poniendo unos cuantos pedazos del proceder del Señor Williams. 

william stoner and john williams think about war

1. A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.

2. “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.”

--escribe John Williams, en Stoner. Leí la novela hace un año y, porque seguía pensando en ella, quise buscar en el blog cuáles citas había subido. Me sorprendió descubrir que ninguna. Así que por los próximos días, acá estaré poniendo unos cuantos pedazos del proceder del Señor Williams. 

la inteligencia afectiva, dixit williams

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart. --escribe John Williams, en Stoner. Leí la novela hace un año y, porque seguía pensando en ella, quise buscar en el blog cuáles citas había subido. Me sorprendió descubrir que ninguna. Así que por los próximos días, acá estaré poniendo unos cuantos pedazos del proceder del Señor Williams. 

la lección tardía de william stoner, dixit williams

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. --escribe John Williams, en Stoner. Leí la novela hace un año y, porque seguía pensando en ella, quise buscar en el blog cuáles citas había subido. Me sorprendió descubrir que ninguna. Así que por los próximos días, acá estaré poniendo unos cuantos pedazos del proceder del Señor Williams. 

el abigarramiento de todo lo no leído, escribe williams

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

--escribe John Williams, en Stoner. Leí la novela hace un año y, porque seguía pensando en ella, quise buscar en el blog cuáles citas había subido. Me sorprendió descubrir que ninguna. Así que por los próximos días, acá estaré poniendo unos cuantos pedazos del proceder del Señor Williams. 

the young are weaned on lies, dixit john williams

“Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out."

"Yes, sir," Andrews said.

"Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you--that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old."

"No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice.

"That's not the way it is."

"You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet....look. You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing. You kill three, four thousand buffalo, and stack their skins neat; and the buffalo will rot wherever you left them, and the rats will nest in the skins. What have you got to show? A year gone out of your life, a busted wagon that a beaver might use to make a dam with, some calluses on your hands, and the memory of a dead man."

"No," Andrew said. "That's not all. That's not all I have."

"Then what? What have you got?"

Andrews was silent.

John Williams, Butcher's Crossing