Absalon, Absalon !

Qui que tu sois, une fois parmi des étrangers, des gens qui ne te connaissent pas, tu pourras être tout ce que tu voudras.

Tu remarqueras que la plupart des femmes qui divorcent sont celles qui ont été mariées à la campagne par des juges de paix en train de mâcher leur chique de tabac, ou par des pasteurs réveillés à minuit, sans faux cols, avec leurs bretelles dépassant sous les pans de la redingote, et leur femme ou leur vieille fille de sœur en bigoudis pour servir de témoin.

[...] car à cette époque-là il avait sans doute appris qu'il n'existait que trois choses, et trois seulement : la vie, le plaisir et les ténèbres, et que sans argent il ne pouvait y avoir de plaisir, et que sans plaisir il n'y avait même pas de vie mais simplement l'inspiration et l'expiration protoplasmiques d'un aveugle et embryonnaire organisme dans les ténèbres où la lumière n'a jamais commencé.

Il n'avait que trop bien réussi, vois-tu ; il habitait cette solitude de mépris et de méfiance qu'apporte le succès à celui qui l'a conquis parce qu'il était fort au lieu d'être simplement chanceux.

Do you mark how the wistaria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity’s myriad components? That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.—See how the sleeping outflung hand, touching the bedside candle, remembers pain, springs back and free while mind and brain sleep on and only make of this adjacent heat some trashy myth of reality’s escape: or that same sleeping hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is transformed by that same sleeping brain and mind into that same figment-stuff warped out of all experience. Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that—but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep.

Il lui fallait venir à la ville chercher une femme, exactement comme il serait allé au marché de Memphis acheter du bétail ou des esclaves.

La Nouvelle-Orléans fut un pur hasard, un simple petit supplément aux illogiques machinations d’une fatalité qui avait jeté son dévolu sur cette famille de préférence à toute autre du comté ou du pays, exactement comme un gamin choisit telle fourmilière pour y verser de l’eau bouillante de préférence à telle autre, sans savoir lui-même pourquoi.

[...] he did not even imagine then that there was any such way to live or to want to live, or that there existed all the objects to be wanted which there were, or that the ones who owned the objects not only could look down on the ones that didn't, but could be supported in the down-looking not only by the others who owned objects too but by the very ones that were looked down on that didn't own objects and knew they never would.

Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:—touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am’s private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone’s to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.

Perhaps I couldn’t even have wanted more than that, couldn’t have accepted less, who even at nineteen must have known that living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash. Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either: not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth, relicts the seething and anonymous miasmal mass which in all the years of time has taught itself no boon of death but only how to recreate, renew; and dies, is gone, vanished: nothing—but is that true wisdom which can comprehend that there is a might-have-been which is more true than truth, from which the dreamer, waking, says not ‘Did I but dream?’ but rather says, indicts high heaven’s very self with: ‘Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again?