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		    Acceptance of the Nobel Prize
			   William Faulkner

Delivered at 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 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 are no
longer problems of the spirit.  There is 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, 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 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.


