December 10, 1950
One of my all-time favorite pieces of prose.
I feel that this
award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the
agony and sweat of the human
spirit, not for
glory and least of all for
profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in
trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and
significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the
acclaim too, by using this moment as a
pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and
travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our
tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one
question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human
heart in
conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the
basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his
workshop for anything but the old
verities and truths of the heart, the
universal truths lacking which any story is
ephemeral and doomed--love and
honor and pity and pride and
compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a
curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of
value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without
pity or compassion. His griefs
grieve on no
universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I
decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is
immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has
clanged and faded from the last
worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny
inexhaustible voice, still talking. I
refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will
prevail. He is
immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an
inexhaustible voice, but because he has a
soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's,
duty is to write about these things. It is his
privilege to help man endure by
lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's
voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the
pillars to help him endure and prevail.
He was indeed. I need to reread some of his novels, I do.
When I was at Ole Miss, this phrase was inscribed on the wall in the library foyer... I think... "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."
At least, I remember seeing it quite often and thinking that Faulkner was a righteous dudelisk.
Glad to hear it, John. To me, they have great power.
Thanks reesetee, I've never read this, and feel much better for having just done so.