Spoken by a character who has joined the Army in 1942, and has been issued a bombsight:
A bombsight— I hadn’t made pilot but at least I would be riding up front— allotted to me by a government which didn’t trust me with it and so set spies to watch what I did with it, which before entrusting it to me had trained me not to trust my spies nor anybody else respecting it, in a locked black case which stayed locked by a chain to me even while I was asleep— a condition of constant discomfort of course but mainly of unflagging mutual suspicion and mutual distrust and in time mutual hatred which you even come to endure, which is probably the best of all training for successful matrimony.
| —William Faulkner |
| —The Mansion (Volume 3 of the Snopes Trilogy) |
What a horrible run on sentence. When did they invent editors?
Complaining about run-on sentences in a Faulkner novel is like complaining about verbless ones in a late-period James Ellroy novel — you’re not wrong, but the actual problem may be that you’re not the target audience.
Think I’ll give my wife a big kiss when I get home