Open Thread * Heroes v. Boors (there are plenty of both in the human race)
By Lena Grove aka nasuS on November 28, 2008 at 5:00 PM in Open Thread
Why am I sometimes Lena Grove? Because I read William Faulkner’s Light in August at age 20 and knew that I was she and that her story would always and forever be my life story. I knew.
Her innocence, her aloneness, her endurance in living through crisis after crisis, her primal connection to nature. And so it has been. And will always be.
When my most precious loved one was reading Faulkner’s novels, loved one sent me the speech that Faulkner gave in 1950 when he received the Nobel prize for literature. Here is an invaluable link to everything about that speech, (from OleMiss.edu) including video and audio. Here are the first words:
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 some day 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? …
This is an essential question today, as evidenced by events in Mumbai and our nation’s 9/11. It is VITAL that you read what William Faulkner said after he asked that question.
Wow. And what else is going on?
60% Off at $84.00: 
OR buy the DVD version for 40% off at $20.99: 
DVD Version: 
- An account of the steady growth of President Clinton as a master of the game of nations.
