William Faulkner: A Message For The Future People.

• 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 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.
  • Speech at the Nobel Prize Banquet after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950)

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Ernst said:

Faulkner is an American writer I am not so familiar with but I discovered something on Wikipedia I didn't expect to find.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Faulkner

Is this a message from Mr. Faulkner pointing out that Americans will fail to acheive anything in the long run because our media has been cocooning the "Consumer" for generations?

Faulkner is speaking about his craft and it's industry but it's a simple thing to see that the industry has become the craft.

Fantastic bit of reading for me today.. What do you think?

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NoDrama said:

I never ask myself when will I be blown up. You are 30000 times more likely to be hit by lightning while walking out of your home than be a victim of Terrorism. If I lived in Iraq, Iran, Afghan, Pakistan, Libya, then yes that thought would be going through my brain every day, we all know how efficiently the America the Empire War Machine runs.

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Ernst said:

But that is the brilliance. Since people have been bombing other people a long time even in 1950 he is connecting with people of all times that have bombing in the world.

That we see it anew each day is another aspect to that.

Sometimes it's better to stand still and observe than to run with the flow? That's another derivative.

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Good chat.

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