John Williams, Stoner

About the Shakespeare Sonnet: It means .. it means
Compare the scene where Döhring and Dorothea read A winters tale.
Döhring and Mengs come from an environment of literature poetry and music.
As Jaeger told me: Herodot war mein Gymnasium.

At least by page 60, the author ist still unable to say what it means.

p 62.8
 He found his release and fulfillment in the classes in which he himself was a student. 
There he was able to recapture the sense of discovery he had felt on that first day, 
when Archer Sloane had spoken to him in class and he had, in an instant, 
become someone other than who he had been. 
As his mind engaged itself with its subject, 
as it grappled with the power of the literature he studied
and tried to understand its nature, 
he was aware of a constant change within himself; 
and as he was aware of that,
he moved outward from himself into the world which contained him, 
so that he knew that the poem of Milton 's that he read or the essay of Bacon's 
or the drama of Ben Jonson's changed the world which was its subject, 
and changed it because of its dependence upon it. 
He seldom spoke in class, and his papers rarely satisfied him. 
Like his lectures to his young students,
they did not betray what he most profoundly knew.
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reading the novel is a task, a challenge, eine Aufgabe,
to assimilate it, to be assimilated.
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literature has no significance in the lives of William (or Edith).
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Stylistically the novel is a sequence of separate scenes,
snapshots of life, relatively disconnected one from the other.
Stoners parents; his initial years at the university, working for his board and room,
his conversion to literature; his courtship, his wedding, his failed marriage.
Lomax.
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This is a novel about academic politics, not about literature,
Aüßerlichkeiten university intrigues

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XVI

The years of the war blurred together,
and Stoner went through them as he might have gone
through a driving and nearly unendurable storm,
his head down, his jaw locked,
his mind fixed upon the next step and the next and the next.
Yet for all his stoical endurance
and his stolid movement through the days and weeks,
he was an intensely divided man.
One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste,
the inundation of destruction and death
that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart;
once again he saw the faculty depleted,
he saw the classrooms emptied of their young men,
he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind,
and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart,
the bitter attrition of feeling and care.