margaret_adams 's review for:

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

5.0

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This has vaulted onto the list of my all-time favorite books.

Two favorite passages:

(1)

Lots of nights I would go to bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn’t come yet. You look way up the track, but can't see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of your fidgeting, and listen. You can’t hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which wall come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, ‘Tassuh, little boss, yassuh.'

You don’t dream in that kind of sleep, but you are aware of it every minute you are asleep, as though you were having a long dream of sleep itself, and in that sleep you were dreaming of sleep, sleeping and dreaming of sleep infinitely inward into the center.

That was the way it was for a while after I didn’t have any job. It wasn’t new. It had been like that before, twice before. I had even given a name to it— The Great Sleep. The time before I quit the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish my dissertation for the Ph.D. in American History. It was almost finished, and they said it was O.K. The sheets of typed-on paper were stacked up on the table by the typewriter. The boxes of cards were there. I would get up late in the morning and see them there, the top sheet of paper beginning to curl up around the paper- weight. And I'd see them there when I came in after supper to go to bed. Finally, one morning I got up late and went out the door and didn’t come back and left them there. And the other time the Great Sleep had come was the time before I walked out of the apartment and Lois started to get the divorce.

But this time there wasn’t any American History and there wasn’t any Lois. But there was the Great Sleep.

(2)

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn’t really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place.

You ought to invite those two you’s to the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you’s with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other.

But meanwhile, there isn’t either one of them, and I am in the car in the rain at night.