The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

FAULKNER IS THE ONLY American novelist of my lifetime who has joined our national tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James. The influence of his work upon his life was that it became his life. That is true also of his forerunners Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and of Henry James, who meant little to Faulkner. In his late parable "Carcassonne," chosen to end his collected stories, Faulkner's surrogate prophesies a grand fate: I want to perform something bold and tragical and austere he repeated, shaping the soundless words in the pattering silence me on a buckskin pony with eyes like blue electricity and a mane like tangled fire, galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world. Still galloping, the horse soars outward; still galloping, it thunders up the long blue hill of heaven, its tossing mane in golden swirls like fire.

Steed and rider thunder on, thunder punily diminishing: a dying star upon the immensity of darkness and of silence within which, steadfast, fading, deepbreasted and grave of flank, muses the dark and tragic figure of the Earth, his mother.