July 6th was the 50th anniversary of the death of
the great American writer, William Faulkner. Faulkner spoke on overcoming
soullessness in order that humankind could find eternity through transcendent
creativity.
An excerpt:
“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 the 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 old 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, of 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 relearns
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 simply 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.”
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