<li id="1527582092" class="item item-14 item-even"><li class="itemtimestamp">11/30/2012 5:49 PM <li class="itemsubmitter"> Manic_Butterflies (message) <li class="itemrecommend">recommend <li class="itemreply">reply<li id="1527582098" class="item item-15 item-odd">Bullseye!

There are many humorous responses to this post, and like all finely tuned humor, what makes it funny is the kernel of real truth embedded within it. I would be the first to admit a growing alienation based on gender, but I do not agree with the solution suggested here. In my mind, this simply capitulates to the problem, rather than looking at the root causes for this alienation, and finding ways to ameliorate these trends. Society is an ongoing work in progress, and I am also quite willing to accept that the status of women in all cultures has always been undervalued over the long course of history. There is very little that male dominated societies have to be proud of, when the history of gender relations is considered across the board.

One positive point that I see here, is the writer's acebic wit, is reflecting a keen power of observation. The very fact that she is able to clearly identify these disturbing symptoms of pervasive alienation is indicative of the first step towards possible solutions, which have the potential to produce more balanced and healthy alternatives for our species. Time and space forbid my including possible alternatives here. But fatalism is not one of my leading concepts, as I am the father of two teenagers, and I am completely unwilling to absolve myself of trying to leave this world,perhaps,a trifle bit better than I found it. I may be an incurable, insufferable idealist. But in spite of all doom and gloom scenarios, I believe if we work to communicate, educate, and allow Love in the room somewhere, the problems can be solved and we can move towards evolving in a healthy way. You cannot just give up. 

I hope that I am able to share with you all, something that has been the source of great inspiration to me over many years. It comes to me in the form of the acceptance speech that was delivered by William Faulkner, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. It has been suggested that it was the finest example of such writing ever composed. I can only add that it moved me to tears, and will inspire and encourage me forever.

"All his life William Faulkner had avoided speeches, and insisted that he not be taken as a man of letters. 'I'm just a farmer who likes to tell stories.' he once said. Because of his known aversion to making formal pronouncements, there was much interest, when he traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on December 10, 1950, in what he would say in the speech that custom obliged him to deliver. Faulkner evidently wanted to set right the misinterpretation of his own work as pessimistic. But beyond that, he recognized that, as the first American novelist to receive the prize since the end of World War II, he had a special obligation to take the changed situation of the writer, and of man, into account."

Richard Ellmann

"I decline to accept the end of man."

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
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, 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.

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html