"There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need"
About this Quote
Faulkner makes a small confession sound like a diagnosis. The first sentence is deliberately vague - "something about" - as if language itself can only circle the experience. Then he snaps it into focus: not beauty, not sport, but risk. The pleasure comes from the moment the animal commits, when control becomes a collaboration and the body is forced into absolute presence. "Perhaps" and "in any event" are classic Faulkner hedges: he toys with self-analysis, then shrugs it off. What matters isn't the tidy explanation; it's the appetite.
The subtext is need as compulsion, not hobby. "A thing I need" lands with the bluntness of addiction. Faulkner, a novelist famous for characters trapped in cycles of desire and self-destruction, frames thrill-seeking as a private engine: the gamble that makes the rest of life tolerable. Jumping a fence isn't just athletic; it's a ritualized brush with failure, a controlled flirtation with catastrophe that lets him feel alive, competent, sharpened.
Context helps: Faulkner was a Mississippi man with a taste for horses, hunting, and masculine tests of nerve, living in a culture that prized stoicism and physical prowess. The quote reads like a sideways defense of art itself. Writing, for him, is also a jump: you launch into the air without certainty of landing, courting embarrassment, collapse, and revelation. The fence is whatever limits you - the body, the page, the South's history - and the leap is how he proves he can still clear it.
The subtext is need as compulsion, not hobby. "A thing I need" lands with the bluntness of addiction. Faulkner, a novelist famous for characters trapped in cycles of desire and self-destruction, frames thrill-seeking as a private engine: the gamble that makes the rest of life tolerable. Jumping a fence isn't just athletic; it's a ritualized brush with failure, a controlled flirtation with catastrophe that lets him feel alive, competent, sharpened.
Context helps: Faulkner was a Mississippi man with a taste for horses, hunting, and masculine tests of nerve, living in a culture that prized stoicism and physical prowess. The quote reads like a sideways defense of art itself. Writing, for him, is also a jump: you launch into the air without certainty of landing, courting embarrassment, collapse, and revelation. The fence is whatever limits you - the body, the page, the South's history - and the leap is how he proves he can still clear it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Horse |
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