William Faulkner, marvelously complex and yet relentlessly simple at the same time, was a master of observation and melancholy. The haunting paragraph that opens the second chapter (“June second 1910”) of The Sound and the Fury lingers in the fog of the hours:
“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, ‘I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won,’ he said. ‘They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.'”