Faulkner has left me breathless. The beauty of his prose has astonished me. His words are carefully chosen, chiseled on the sentence, whispered to reach the ear, enter the thoughts and create splendid images. And so "the path like a lead thread among the filaments" has conquered me.

Addie's hands clinging like roots to the blanket, her bones visible beneath the skin, "the eyes like two candles when you watch them melt in the saucer of an iron candlestick" have remained.

Each chapter paced by a different narrator, who repeats, tells the long odyssey, from the agony of the dying mother to her burial, nine days after in the earth that conceived her. Addie is the Mother. She wants to return home dead because life is nothing but a preparation to be dead in some way. And her life has been unhappy, wife by duty, mother by duty, lover for a little while and to that son born of love she gives herself unrewarded with all of herself. She speaks to us in a single chapter, tells her suffering, the word that creates and entangles her in herself, her being violated and at the same time made whole by time, by her husband. Only she knows the power of blood, as if the others were really not her children. The same children who carry out her wishes with respect. The family arrives on the edge of the abyss at the moment when the lid of the coffin is closed and the journey is a sort of catharsis, a liberation from themselves, from the previous life, from lies, from meanness, from stupidity. And only when the earth covers the lid does it seem that everything has rest, like a pact that must be kept with all one's strength so as not to incur some curse. A journey that reminds me a lot of the Joad family, the same poverty, pride, despair, which here has moments of farce, of a journey towards liberation. Splendid is the figure of little Vardaman, who watches his dying mother in silence "the heart too full for words" who is afraid of death, who mistakes his mother for a fish, who does not want to think that she is closed in a coffin because he cannot imagine her there, in the dark and alone, who imagines her swimming in the river and sees Jefferson as the promised land.

Cash is the eldest of the house, the carpenter who saws the mother's coffin under her eyes while she dies, who smooths the corners and sands the wood with commitment and effort, a giant who cleans the coffin of the splashes of mud with a twig, with an incredible tenderness, and who suffers in silence the pains of hell just to reach the goal.

Then there is Darl, the son who knows the secrets of the family, wise in his madness and who attacks Jewel, the son perhaps best characterized by the accounts of the others, power, fire, pride. He loves and hates the mother. He knows he is different but at the same time tries to be accepted. He has white eyes like bones and black hair like pitch, he burns and the fire that he has on him in the end makes him free.

Another book comes to my mind from Addie's monologue and the hill where so many spoke from the dead.

SEREPTA MANSON
The flower of my life could have bloomed on all sides
if a cruel wind had not saddened my petals
from the side of me that you could see in the village.
From the dust I raise a voice of protest:
You never saw my blooming side!
You who live, are really fools,
you who do not know the ways of the wind
nor the invisible forces
that govern the processes of life.

Second reading. Still deeply impressive.

The Addie section in particular is a stunning piece of work. I mean look at this:

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other's blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever….

…So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream. I knew that it had been, not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse; it didn't matter.

I would think that even while I lay with him in the dark and Cash asleep in the cradle within the swing of my hand. I would think that if he were to wake and cry, I would suckle him, too. Anse or love: it didn't matter. My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.

Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed that I would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it. But then I had realised that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he couldn't have known he was right anymore than I could have known I was wrong.

“Nonsense,” Anse said; “you and me aint nigh done chapping yet, with just two….

…He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse. It was not that I could think of myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now. And when I would think Cash and Darl that way until their names would die and solidify into a shape and then fade away, I would say, All right. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they call them.

And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other, and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. Like Cora, who could never even cook.

She would tell me what I owed to my children and to Anse and to God. I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them. I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled. I would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word. That was more than he asked, because he could not have asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word….

… One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

This passage delves deep into Addie's complex emotions and her views on life, love, motherhood, and the power of words. It shows her disillusionment with the false meanings attached to words and her struggle to find true connection and understanding in a world full of pretenses. Addie's thoughts and experiences are presented in a raw and honest way, making this section a powerful exploration of the human psyche.