My first time with ‘The Sound and the Fury': Four decades later, vivid and shattering

In my first year of college, I was, like many kids in the early 1970s, and today, working full time and taking a full load of courses. I often came home from my horrible busboy job at midnight or later and did homework.

One night, I came in about 12:30 a.m. Dang: Big discussion in class tomorrow of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. It'd be my first Faulkner since the story "A Rose for Emily." Still in my busboy's uniform, smeared with the dinners of others, I sat down with my Modern Library paperback, planning to skim.

Next I looked up, I was done. And the sun just up. Those last three searing words — Dilsey: They endured — were breaking my heart. Dawn. Ugh. Ache. I could take a nap, shower, drive to school. No nap, though: I was vibrating, tearful, wracked, haunted, in Faulkner's world, the Compson family, crumbling mansions, passion, decline, outrage, and indomitable resolve.

Three hundred pages in seven hours and change? Not a big deal. I'm not going to tell you I understood every word. Come on, I was 18. But I'd been urged from one cover to the other, the people and the minds and the story. Benjy is transfixed at the golfers on the course: They cry "Caddie!" and he thinks it's for his sister, Caddy, center of the maelstrom. Tortured, doomed Quentin: I have committed incest I said Father it was I. Jason, staring into the sun, chases his wayward niece. Dilsey prays and stands. Benjy bellows in church, "the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun." Family. History. What it means, on this Earth, to be lost, saved.

I owe The Sound and the Fury a return date. Absalom! Absalom! I've revisited plenty of times. I taught Light in August year after year in college, read Sanctuary, The Bear, and Go Down, Moses! again and again. But this one, not yet. Then again, thanks to a wired, beyond-exhausted all-nighter 41 years ago, The Sound and the Fury is etched alongside the most vivid memories I have.