Word: paled
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Rousing Rabble. Yoknapatawpha and its county seat, Jefferson, have their pale counterpart in actuality: Lafayette County and Oxford, where Faulkner lived, worked and occasionally puzzled his mildly curious fellow citizens. "The posted woods on my property contain several tame squirrels," he advised them a few years ago in a sarcastic no-trespassing notice he published in the weekly Oxford Eagle. "Any hunter who feels himself too lacking in woodcraft and marksmanship to approach a dangerous wild squirrel, might feel safe with these." But the real county is the one Faulkner invented, just as the real Troy is Homer...
...divorce, the wrongs of a laissez-faire economy. Yet before his death in 1920, with the realism he had preached unshakably in vogue, he wrote to his friend Henry James, "I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight." Dead he was, and despite a recent and wholly campus-bound revival, he is likely to remain so: his best-known novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, will no doubt remain merely the second deadly Silas (after George Eliot's Silas Marner) of required student reading...
...wells went on writing his pale, successful novels and his unsuccessful plays (although George Bernard Shaw saw promise in them), urged people to read Zola and Tolstoy, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, and wrote an appreciation of Mark Twain that is a good deal better than the piece Twain wrote about him. At the end, when the bright young men he had encouraged had gone far beyond him. he endured patiently the cutting down of his statues. But his eclipse was only temporary. Eventually he came to be acknowledged a great man of letters, if not a great author...
...observation. A story mysteriously titled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius concerns a mythical planet where people have no conception of material objects. Things have no names; they are described as they appear at the moment. People call the moon, for example, "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky." Life has dissolved into pure poetry...
...Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. A brilliantly clever arrangement of mirrors, trap doors and hidden staircases bamboozles readers, critics and perhaps characters in this thoroughly eccentric novel, most of which is in the form of a windy gloss of an old poet's last work, by an academic woodenhead who may or may not be the deposed, homosexual ex-king of a land called Zembla...