Stoner

Stoner. A book that I had been eyeing forever. A book that had been at the back of my mind for years and tugging at my sleeve, but I kept putting it off, until this summer. Someone told me it’s not a book for my summer vacation. I didn’t care. It was about time I read it, and Greece was perhaps the perfect place.

From the very beginning, the book pulls you in with its natural flow. There is a sort of melancholy throughout the book, yet you find some beacon of hope resonating through the immaculate prose. It builds and builds; it sucks you in and you are at the precipice without knowing how you got there.

William grew up on a farm, was sent to university to study agriculture, naturally, but falls in love with literature. Some things in life cannot be unchanged. He steered towards his life calling and Shakespeare and Sloan were there to guide him.

“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.”

The protagonist is one of us. We go about our lives with best intentions. Friends come, then they go. We find love, it finds us, but things happen. It goes too. Life offers us moments to remember; it offers us moments to forget. Stoner was served a tough hand, but he held his head high. He got married to a woman that made his life hard, but he plowed through and made the best of it. Kathrine was a shining star, something that you cannot resist. The antithesis to his wife, but also something that is temporary, as every joy in life is.

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

So, sitting at Emmanuel’s Beer House Tavern in Sarti, Greece, contemplating my life decisions while having an IPA, I realised that Stoner is someone that could have been myself, or at least someone that has traits that remind me of myself. I can’t put my finger on it. I just know that my heart grew heavy as I flipped each page and that the butterflies in my stomach became ever-present by the end of the book. I also realised that it was not to be finished without wet cheeks. Good thing I had sunglasses on. John Williams, you did me in and I commend you for that.