The Saturday Evening Post (4 June, 1932)

The two men drove up the hill toward the blood-red sun. The cotton fields bordering the road were thin and withered², and no breeze stirred in the pines.

“When I am totally sober,” the doctor was saying —“I mean when I am totally sober — I don’t see the same world that you do. I’m like a friend of mine who had one good eye and got glasses made to correct his bad eye; the result was that he kept seeing elliptical suns and falling off tilted³ curbs⁴, until he had to throw the glasses away. Granted that I am thoroughly⁵ anaesthetized the greater part of the day — well, I only undertake work that I know I can do when I am in that condition.”

“Yeah,” agreed his brother Gene⁶ uncomfortably. The doctor was a little tight at the moment and Gene could find no opening for what he had to say. Like so many Southerners of the humbler classes, he had a deep-seated courtesy, characteristic of all violent and passionate⁷ lands — he could not change the subject until there was a moment’s silence, and Forrest would not shut up.

“I’m very happy,” he continued, “or very miserable⁸. I chuckle⁹ or I weep alcoholically and, as I continue to slow up, life accommodatingly goes faster, so that the less there is of myself inside, the more diverting becomes the moving picture without. I have cut myself off from the respect of my fellow man, but I am aware of a compensatory cirrhosis of the emotions. And because my sensitivity, my pity, no longer has direction, but fixes itself on whatever is at hand, I have become an exceptionally good fellow — much more so than when I was a good doctor.”

As the road straightened after the next bend and Gene saw his house in the distance, he remembered his wife’s face as she had made him promise, and he could wait no longer: “Forrest, I got a thing —”

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