Time and Time Again These Ment Struggle and Sacrifice

William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Feast at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950 *

Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not fabricated to me as a man, but to my work – a life's piece of work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, non for celebrity and to the lowest degree of all for profit, just to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. And then this honor is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to discover a dedication for the coin office of information technology commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to exercise the aforementioned 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 hither where I am continuing.

Our tragedy today is a full general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can fifty-fifty bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I exist blown up? Because of this, the beau or adult female writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which lonely tin brand skilful writing because merely that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must larn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget information technology forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything just the old verities and truths of the center, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes non of dear simply 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 middle 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 take the end of homo. Information technology is easy plenty to say that human is immortal only considering he volition endure: that when the terminal dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even and then there volition yet exist 1 more than 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 considering he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible vox, 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 virtually these things. It is his privilege to help man endure past lifting his middle, by reminding him of the courage and accolade and hope and pride and pity and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his by. The poet's voice demand not simply be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

* The speech was plain revised by the author for publication in The Faulkner Reader. These minor changes, all of which improve the address stylistically have been incorporated here.

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