a dim hot airless room

     I hate a dark house, so much so that even on bright sunlit days I like to have lights on in whatever room I'm working in at the time.  But as the temperature outside climbs to over a hundred degrees again today, I've been walking around the house turning off lights and closing blinds. Doing this has reminded me of my favorite opening line from one of my all time favorite novels, Absalom, Absalom!, written by William Faulkner.  

     "From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."


     After reading some less than stellar books this spring, I've decided to pull from a list of old favorites for my summer reading, beginning with Absalom, Absalom!. And because using a Kindle app to read anything written by William Faulkner seems less than kosher, I'm going to make my way down to my cool dark basement and root out my well-worn, note riddled copy of Absalom. What else is there to do on a day when the temperature is expected to rise to 108 degrees?