The set of that mouth was often my barometer, told me the weight of day on Wednesday after my interview, when I woke and consulted him with a happening glance, his pain was simply Bacchic! That was something, now! Out of bed I sprang, unclothed, to put a dance on the phonograph while the spell should last. It began with Laocoön on the mantelpiece, his voiceless groan. A great example is the protagonist’s giddy delight near the beginning of John Barth’s The End of the Road: I am strongly biased toward peaceful interludes at any price, portending what trouble they may: Harry Potter gets his mysterious Firebolt Beorn provides supper and rough clean beds. The allotment of light and shadow in the literary version of life emerges as a central formal feature in the three stories of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, because when things are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad, they are horrid. It was better to acknowledge this, and face out the truth in a religious faith.

smiled, and shook her head, and said she was trying to school herself against ever anticipating any pleasure that it was better to be brave and submit faithfully there was some good reason, which we should know in time, why sorrow and disappointment were to be the lot of some on earth. Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell tried to persuade Charlotte Brontë-whose grim experience of the world suggested otherwise-that everybody has it the same in the long run, but in some people’s lives good and evil are blended, rather than coming in “strong patches of light or shadow”: Pale Horse, Pale Rider, by Katherine Anne Porter. An experiment with the form of the nineteenth-century-style review: mega-long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.

Pale rider on a pale horse