Every now and then I go to the bookshelf in my house that has collected on it all the works of William Faulkner and several books about the man and his stories.  I was born across the river from Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County and lived there, steeped (marinated might be a another way of putting it) in the culture that is peculiar to Arkansas and Mississippi, to that part of the south. My parents took me away from there and transplanted me in the Central Valley of California at the time when I was passing out of my childhood and entering the confusion of adolescence. I liked the new home, but I never got over being occasionally homesick... without ever knowing what it was specifically that I was homesick for. It has been a chronic condition all my life.  I like to travel; but always after I’ve gone on to someplace else, I find myself looking back with unspecific longing.  Living in a place for awhile, even for a short while, puts something in me that wasn’t there before.  My Mother recognized  something in me that she apparently didn’t see in her other children.  I heard her say once when she was talking to her sister and didn’t know I was listening, “If someone came along dragging a sack, Jerral would get on it.”  

“Dragging a sack” was something one of Faulkner’s people could have said. It isn’t something that Central California people would say. Mother was right.  I like to travel, but I also like looking back to where I’ve been. It’s why I went to the Faulkner bookshelf today.  Sometimes I need to reread the first paragraph of one of his novels or the beginning of a short story.  Usually I don’t go to the shelf with anything in mind but mainly just to reconnect with an old friend, but today I went specifically to reread his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I would love to have been there to hear it.  A few years ago I was in the great hall in Stockholm; and when I was there, I squinted my eyes and pretended I was hearing him say it.  He spoke his speech in the language of my childhood; and when I listen to a recording of it, I close my eyes and it’s like listening to my Grandfather.

William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Stockholm, Sweden, 1949

      “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.”