This is how it always was

“This is how it always was” names the moment when a character’s accusatory certainty gives way to the recognition that the supposed change was never real. Repeated in two distinct crises, the phrase turns revelation into a confrontation with self-deception: what has disappeared is not the original object, but the blindness that kept its true condition out of sight.

First Appearance: Buster’s Doubt

When Buster believes someone has been inside and ruined his game, he imagines that one of “Them” has acted against him. Against this escalating suspicion, a quieter voice—described as perhaps the fading voice of sanity—offers the phrase’s first form: “This is how i't was from the very start, the voice whispered. You just didn't see it.” The wording does not merely deny the alleged sabotage; it recasts the apparent change as a failure of perception from the beginning. Buster nevertheless goes to the closet intending to take down the gun, and the telephone rings as he feels for it. Recognition has surfaced, but it has not yet settled the immediate danger.

Norris and the Returned Fishing Rod

The phrase returns when Norris discovers that the sleek Bazun rod has become a dirty, splintery bamboo pole with a child’s Zebco reel attached by one rusty screw. He cries that someone stole it, and his jealousy and paranoid covetousness surge back; he imagines killing whoever is responsible, even everyone in town. The visible contrast between the prized rod and the shabby stick gives his accusation a concrete focus, but the voice answers that “All that's been stolen is your blinders-the ones you put on yourself, of your own free will.”

The storm’s lightning flashes again, showing the bamboo rod where the Bazun had seemed to be. Norris remembers that he had put it there so it would be the last thing he saw when he stepped off the stool. No one entered or moved it, and that fact forces him to acknowledge the voice’s account. The phrase thus connects the object’s unchanged physical state with a devastating change in Norris’s understanding: the theft was an illusion, and the blindness that sustained it was his own.

Repetition and Significance

Across the two appearances, the phrase works as a counterstatement to persecution. Buster hears it as a voice of sanity amid his suspicion; Norris hears its equivalent as an angry voice that challenges him to act rather than flee into darkness. In both scenes, the assertion that the present condition was the original one dismantles a story of deliberate interference. The repeated wording makes recognition less a comforting return to normal than a reckoning with how freely each man had accepted his distorted view.