The Human Spirit

I know that my dear friend, Beth (with whom I took creative writing classes back in the eighties), will not mind that I share her recent e-mail to me regarding William Faulkner and how meaningful she found the following speech of Faulkner's:

Dear Theresa,

For some reason, I have been “into” Faulkner lately.  It came to me that I should re-read “Barn Burning.”  So I took out a Faulkner audio from the library, and on the CD was Faulkner, giving this speech.  It struck me to the bone, went to the core of me, I hurt when I heard it.

I am collecting some quotes and such that aid me at my desk and I wanted the entire text of this short speech.  I thought you might enjoy it, if you have not heard or read it.  Love, Beth

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech

Stockholm, December 10, 1950

 

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, 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 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 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 isto 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.

I have underlined what is most meaningful to me.  "The human heart in conflict with itself" is what I try to write about.  It is what interests me most, beyond artifice, beyond plot, beyond technique.  Just the crisp, clear ringing of the heart. 

Faulkner believed people had ceased to ask questions about the problems of the human spirit.  I have found myself thinking about this idea ceaselessly since I have read it because it is a belief I also have entertained. 

It is the writer's work to keep asking those questions, the ones about the problems of the human spirit, the ones that really matter.

Thanks, Beth.