Word: compsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...whatever happened to the lost art of existential crisis that used to be the sine qua non of college experience? I’m not advocating that we ultimately throw ourselves into the Charles River, like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury. But surely it wouldn’t hurt to skip class once in awhile, go boating with dapper northern bluebloods, play with our father’s watch and indulge in jumbled metaphysical speculations about the nature of time. The incest part might have been a little weird. But Faulkner, like other writers, had a point...
...full day of mind-numbingly monotonous competition had Gadfly on the verge of pulling a Quentin Compson. Luckily, this year’s Head of the Charles was more about free samples of Gore-Tex gear and Best Buy big screens than actual athletics...
...Quentin Compson. Drowned in the odour of honeysuckle. 1891-1910.” This seemingly inscrutable epitaph is inscribed onto a brick-sized plaque on the eastern railing of the Larz Anderson Bridge, just down JFK St. The plaque commemorates one of the most notorious freshmen ever to grace Harvard’s campus. Alienated by Northern academic culture, consumed by memories of his Mississippi home, and still lusting after his sister Caddy, Compson was looking for a way out on June 2, 1910. After a day of wandering aimlessly in Boston, he tied a pair of tailor?...
Thankfully, this story is not fact, but fiction—taken from William Faulkner’s famous novel, The Sound and the Fury. There’s no proof that Faulkner even visited the campus before publishing the novel in 1929. But Faulkner fanatics have ensured that Compson will be remembered alongside other—albeit more visibly memorialized—Harvard figures such as Harry Widener...
...sound and fury: the Faulkner plaque on the Lars Anderson bridge. The plaque is small, bronze, weathered and nearly impossible to pick out against the brick on the bridge's northwest side; it's inscribed "to Quentin Compson, drowned in a field of honeysuckle." Cognoscenti will recognize the bridge as the supposed location of one of the novel's great tragedies...