Stoner

Author: John Williams

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2013/11/20

Pages: 292

Sometimes, I think John Williams is in my head (no, not the composer conducting a tiny symphony playing the Star Wars Main Theme, although sometimes I have that in my head too. But I’m talking about the writer John Williams, the one you’ve probably never heard of). It takes an academic to know the soul-crushing, mind-numbing depression involved in living a life of the mind, or whatever you want to call it. See, those lucky people outside of academia think that we live in this lovely world that is just like college, where we have no responsibilities and can just think about interesting stuff all the time (probably while wearing silly hats). In reality, our days are filled with petty annoyances, disillusionment, and despair.

(Can you tell I’m at the tail-end of my PhD and feeling like I’ll never get out of this hellhole?)

Anyway, one of the disconcertingly awesome things about Stoner is having someone who has been there echo back the small triumphs and the crippling insecurities. Exhibit A:

“Through it all he continued to teach and study, though he sometimes felt that he hunched his back futilely against the driving storm and cupped his hands uselessly around the dim flicker of his last poor match.” (p. 246).

THAT IS MY LIFE. But why am I here?

“It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration.” (p. 75)

I really can’t say anything intelligent about the book at this point: it just affected me so deeply. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything so quietly devastating, so evocative of an experience that I wish I couldn’t relate to. Every academic should read this book.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the end of the book. I’m spoiler tagging it, but there’s no information here that you wouldn’t also get from the first page: “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial. He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.” (p. 277)</spoiler.>