Passage 1: Chapter 1
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they
come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon,
never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes
away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is
the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember,
and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the
truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back
from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at
the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the
bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.
Passage 2: Chapter 9
Most of the day she was at the store, but at night she was
there in the big house and sometimes it creaked and cried all
night under the weight of lonesomeness. Then she'd lie awake in
bed asking lonesomeness some questions. She asked if she
wanted to leave and go back where she had come from and try to
find her mother. Maybe tend her grandmother's grave. Sort of
look over the old stamping ground generally. Digging around
inside of herself like that she found that she had no interest in
that seldom-seen mother at all. She hated her grandmother and
had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity. She
had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in
search of people; it was important to all the world that she should
find them and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur
dog, and run off down a back road after things. It was all accord-
ing to the way you see things. Some people could look at a mud-
puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that
other kind that loved to deal in scraps. Here Nanny had taken the
biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how
far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and
pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it
about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her.
Passage 3: Chapter 2
It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent
most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard.
She had been spending every minute that she could steal from
her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to
say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her
to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to
glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of
bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a
flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered
again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had noth-
ing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out
smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and
caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely
felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried
themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about
her consciousness.
She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in
the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the pant-
ing breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to
her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom;
the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the
ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in
every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!
She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a
pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.
