Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

tearing oneself apart for the amusement of the audience.

For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death.

I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.

That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a fact so technologically, economically, and politically validated that we usually forget to ask how fully this fact represents a true community, the spiritually significant communion which the old romantic unionism had envisaged.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.