A tiny bit miserable. That gritty, bloody sort of optimistic stoicism that defines so much of American literature. An obvious prototype of McCarthy, clear cousin of Steinbeck and Faulkner — “one day I will find the right words, and they will be simple” variety prose. A long, drawn-out howl; a whistle in the dark. Fitting style for a violent cultural heritage. Sometimes not that fun to read, but I still might could’ve read a millionuvem.

This is why we need monarchy.

I love to be surprised by a classic. To read something knowing it is the bar for so many other critical works, and still come away feeling my expectations not only validated but wildly exceeded — no better feeling. Augustine’s Confessions, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Melville’s Moby Dick. Some novels will always be revelatory.

There are other novels. Still classics, still foundational and in their own way innovative, but for better or for worse indistinguishable from their Wikipedia plot summaries. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the eldest Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Too, Animal Farm.

One of about five novels I picked up recently in a ten-year-belated endeavor to catch up on my high school homework, though perhaps better suited to a middle school curriculum. All surface, and all very well, but doesn’t leave me much to say. At least, nothing that an enterprising eighth-grade history enthusiast hasn’t already articulated in strict MLA format. The pigs are the guys. What more do you want.

Just sad and heavy. And the humor it contains only emphasizes the sad and the heavy.

So it goes. So it continues, senselessly, endlessly, ritually. Death upon monotonous death, nothing new under the sun. It goes and will always go, and could not go otherwise.

So it goes. So the story goes. So the prophecy is written and enacted, death marvelously orchestrated. Death as it should be. Death as the natural consequence, good writing.

So it goes. So life departs. So time makes move to leave us, and history to peel itself from us, and it is always an active thing. Every moment life leaves us, infinite, unceasing deaths of the soul.

So it goes. So we continue, senselessly, endlessly, ritually. Conscripted: written into the plot of needful death. Always passing slowly through the wreckage.

So it goes.