[00:00.31]The Props to Help Man Endure
[00:03.81]I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work,
[00:10.92]a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.
[00:15.30]Not for glory and least of all, for profit,
[00:19.01]but to create out of the material of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
[00:26.13]So this award is only mine in trust.
[00:29.96]It would not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it,
[00:34.88]commensurate for the purpose and significance of its origin.
[00:39.36]But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too
[00:43.51]by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to
[00:48.54]by the young men and woman,already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,
[00:54.13]among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.
[01:01.35]Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now
[01:09.00]that we can even bear it.
[01:10.97]There’re no longer problems of the spirit, there’s only the question;
[01:16.00]“When will I be blown up?”
[01:18.62]Because of this, the young man or woman writing today
[01:22.45]has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself,
[01:27.26]which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about,
[01:32.07]worth the agony and the sweat.
[01:34.49]He must learn them again, he must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid,
[01:41.26]and teaching himself that,forget it forever,
[01:44.76]leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart.
[01:51.11]The old universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed:
[01:57.23]love and honor and pity and pride,
[01:59.53]and compassion and sacrifice.
[02:02.05]Until he does so, he labors under a curse.
[02:06.09]He writes not of love, but of lust,
[02:09.16]of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value,
[02:13.42]of victories without hope, and most of all, without pity or compassion.
[02:18.67]His grief weaves on no universal bone, leaving no scars.
[02:24.47]He writes not of the heart, but of the glands.
[02:28.19]Until he relearns these things,
[02:31.03]he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man.
[02:35.62]I decline to accept the end of man.
[02:38.68]It’s easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure:
[02:44.26]that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged
[02:48.75]and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tireless in the last red and dying evening,
[02:55.42]that even then, there will still be one more sound:
[02:59.36]that of his puny and inexhaustible voice, still talking.
[03:04.72]I refuse to accept this.
[03:07.48]I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
[03:11.97]He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
[03:18.20]but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion,and sacrifice, and endurance.
[03:26.62]The poets’, the writers’ duty is to write about these things.
[03:31.54]It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,
[03:36.25]by reminding him of the courage,and honor
[03:39.52]and hope and compassion and pity
[03:42.59]and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
[03:46.52]The poets' voice need not merely be the record of man,
[03:51.12]it can be one of the props,
[03:53.52]the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
[03:56.91]
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