but the streets leading into it were paved now, with fixed signs of
interdiction and admonition applicable only to something capable of moving
faster than thirty miles an hour; and now the last forest tree was gone
from the courthouse yard too, replaced by formal synthetic shrubs
contrived and schooled in Wisconsin greenhouses, and in the courthouse
(the city hall too) a courthouse and city hall gang, in miniature of
course (but that was not its fault but the fault of the city's and the
county's size and population and wealth) but based on the pattern of
Chicago and Kansas City and Boston and Philadelphia (and which, except for
its minuscularity, neither Philadelphia nor Boston nor Kansas City nor
Chicago need have blushed at) which every three or four years would try
again to raze the old courthouse in order to build a new one, not that
they did not like the old one nor wanted the new, but because the new one
would bring into the town and county that much more increment of unearned
federal money;
314 WILLIAM FAULKNER
And now the paint is preparing to weather from an anti-tank howitzer
squatting on rubber tires on the opposite flank of the Confederate monument~
and gone now from the fronts of the stores are the old brick made of native
clay in Sutpen's architect's old molds, replaced now by sheets of glass
taller than a man and longer than a wagon and team, pressed intact in
Pittsburgh factories and framing interiors bathed now in one sbadowless
corpse-glare of fluorescent light; and, now and at last, the last of silence
too: the county's hollow inverted air one resonant boom and ululance of
radio: and thus no more Yoknapatawpha's air nor even Mason and Dixon's air,
but America's: the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female
vocalists, the babbling pressure to buy and buy and still buy arriving more
instantaneous than light, two thousand miles from New York and Los Angeles;
one air, one nation: the shadowless fluorescent corpse-glare bathing the
sons and daughters of men and women, Negro and white both, who were born to
and who passed all their lives in denim overalls and calico, haggling by
cash or the install ment-pl an for garments copied last week out of Harper's
Bazaar or Esquire in East Side sweat-shops: because an entire generation of
farmers has vanished, not just from Yoknapatawpha's but from Mason and
Dixon's earth: the selfconsumer: the machine which displaced the man because
the exodus of the man left no one to drive the mule, now that the machine
was threatening to extinguish the mule; time was when the mule stood in
droves at daylight in the plantation mule-lots across the plantation road
from the serried identical ranks of two-room shotgun shacks in which lived
in droves with his family the Negro tenant- or share- or furnish-hand who
bridled him (the mule) in the lot at sunup and followed him through the
plumb-straight monotony of identical furrows and back to the lot at sundown,
with (the man) one eye on where the mule was going and the other eye on his
(the mule's) heels; both gone now: the one, to the last of the forty- and
fifty- and sixty-acre hill farms inaccessible from unmarked dirt roads, the
other to New York and Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles ghettos, or nine
out of ten of him that is, the tenth one mounting from the handles of a plow
to the springless bucket seat of a tractor, dispossessing and displacing the
other nine just as the tractor had dispossessed and displaced the other
eighteen mules to whom that nine would have been complement; then Warsaw and
Dunkerque displaced that tenth in his turn, and now the planter's not-yet-
drafted son drove the tractor: and then Pearl Harbor and Tobruk and Utah
Beach displaced that son, leaving the planter himself on the seat of the
tractor, for a little while that is
REQUIEM FOR A NUN 315
--or so he thought, forgetting that victory or defeat both are bought at
the same exorbitant prices of change and alteration; one nation, one
world: young men who had never been farther from Yoknapatawpha County than
Memphis or New Orleans (and that not often), now talked glibly of street
intersections in Asiatic and European capitals, returning no more to
inherit the long monotonou endless unendable furrows of Mississippi
cottor, field- living now (with now a wife and next year a wife and child
and the year after that a wife and children) in automobile trailers or
G.I. barracks on the outskirts of liberal arts colleges, and the father
and now grandfather himself still driving the tractor across the gradually
diminishing fields between the long looping skeins of electric lines
bringing electric power from the Appalachian mountains, and the subterrene
steel veins bringing the natural gas from the Western plains, to the
little lost lonely farmhouses glittering and gleaming with automatic
stoves and washing machines and television antennae;
One nation: no longer anywhere, not even in Yoknapatawpha County, one last
irreconcilable fastness of stronghold from which to enter the United
States, because at last even the last old sapless indomitable unvanquished
widow or maiden aunt had died and the old deathless Lost Cause had become
a faded (though still select) social club or caste, or form of behavior
when you remembered to observe it on the occasions when young men from
Brooklyn, exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas
Universities, vended tiny Confederate battle flags among the thronged
Saturday afternoon ramps of football stadia; one world: the tank gun: cap-
tured from a regiment of Germans in an African desert by a regiment of
Japanese in American uniforms, whose mothers and fathers at the time were
in a California detention camp for enemy aliens, and carried (the gun)
seven thousand miles back to be set halfway between, as a sort of
secondary flying buttress to a memento of Shiloh and The Wilderness; one
universe, one cosmos: contained in one America: one towering frantic
edifice poised like a card-house.over the abyss of the mortgaged
generations; one boom, one peace: one swirling rocket-roar filling the
glittering zenith as with golden featherg, until the vast hollow sphere
of his air, the vast and terrible burden beneath which he tries to stand
erect and lift his battered and indomitable head-the very substance in
which he lives and, lacking which, he would vanish in a matter of
seconds~is murmurous with his fears and terrors and disclaimers and
repudiations and his aspirations and dreams
316 WILLIAM FAULKNER
and his baseless hopes, bouncing back at him in radar waves from the
constellatons;
And still-the old jail-endured, sitting in its rumorless culde-sac, its
almost seasonless backwater in the middle of that rush and roar of civic
progress and social alteration and change like a collarless (and reasonably
clean: merely dingy: with a day's stubble and no garters to his socks) old
man sitting in his suspenders and stocking feet, on the back kitchen steps
inside a walled courtyard; actually not isolated by location so much as
insulated by obsolescence: on the way out of course (to disappear from the
surface of the earth along with the rest of the town on the day when all
America, after cutting down all the trees and leveling the hills and moun-
tains with bulldozers, would have to move underground to make room for, get