Status Updates From Stoner

“He began to resent the time he had to spend at work on the Foote farm. Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study. Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know”

“When he was much older, he was to look back upon his last two undergraduate years as if they were an unreal time that belonged to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was used, but in fits and starts”

“In the evenings the three of them sat in the small kitchen lighted by a single kerosene lamp, staring into the yellow flame; often during the hour or so between supper and bed, the only sound that could be heard was the weary movement of a body in a straight chair and the soft creak of a timber giving a little beneath the age of the house”

La descrizione dei genitori all’inizio mi spacca:
A trent’anni, suo padre ne dimostrava già cinquanta; piegato dalla fatica, fissava disperato l’arido pezzo di terra che di anno in anno dava da campare alla sua famiglia. Sua madre sopportava la vita con pazienza, come una lunga disgrazia destinata a finire.