Quote of the Day (Faulkner)

“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 dingdong 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.”—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1950

(Five years after Hiroshima and the onset of the Cold War, a half year into the Korean War, Faulkner made these remarks. It was as dark a time as one can imagine. Now, seven years after 9/11, in an atmosphere of moral and political confusion at home and abroad, it is worth recalling his words about the best instincts of men—of the citizen’s possibilities of displaying these and of the writer’s responsibilities to remind us of their existence. Faulkner’s words remind us why, in the end, despite ourselves, the terrorists’ hopes of 9/11 will not be fulfilled.)