Passage 17. The Props to Help Man Endure (I)

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 material of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

So this award is only mine in trust.

It would not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it,

commensurate for 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 woman,already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,

among whom is already that one who will someday stand here 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’re no longer problems of the spirit, there’s 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 old universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed:

love and honor and pity and pride,

and compassion and sacrifice.