The Props to Help Man Endure
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.
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 most of all, without pity or compassion.
His grief weaves on no universal bone, leaving no scars.
He writes not of the heart, but of the glands.
Until he relearns 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’s easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure:
that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged
and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tireless in the last red and dying evening,
that even then, there will still be one more sound:
that of his puny and 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 poets’, the writers’ 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 compassion and pity
and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
The poets' voice need not merely be the record of man,
it can be one of the props,
the pillars to help him endure and prevail.