Adonis Diaries

By: William Faulkner

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? (Almost every day, there is a shooting in schools)

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. (If the writer is Not emotionally deficient)

He must learn them again. (Meaning try hard to acquire emotional Intelligence?)

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, 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 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 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. (Too long a sentence to comprehend what he refuses to accept)

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. (He did prevail at the expense of most other living species and he defeated his survival process)

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. (Not convincing: Not hungry big beasts care for the babies of other animal species)

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 needs not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

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