e-verities

At his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, Sweden in 1950, William Faulkner, hoping to be heard by young writers, said:

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 one 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 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, and 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.

He spoke these words at a point in history when it seemed the USSR and the US stood glaring at one another with trembling fingers poised over buttons that could destroy the world many times over. They caught my attention two decades later, during a summer spent immersed in many other Faulkner writings for which he is more famous. That he identified “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” as truth, universal and lasting, reinforced my hope moving-toward-belief that there were things in life that were not “ephemeral and doomed.”

Decades later still--when I found myself reeling, doubting, and feeling doomed even more so than when first forming my beliefs--Faulkner’s words were recalled to me via wordplay encountered surfing the Net. A line in a Publisher’s Weekly news story used, or coined, the word, “e-verities” and brought to my mind Faulkner's “eternal verities.” About that time, some of my students introduced me to blogging, and on an impulse, I began a blog to explore verities. I thought the word, “e-verities,” an appropriate title because the “e” could be an abreviation for “eternal,” “ephemeral,” or “electronic.” The ambiguity of the word reflected the ambiguity of the values being explored and the medium where the exploration was to be recorded.

This post attempts to refocus my purpose. I began e-verities to examine values like those listed by Faulkner: love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice, asking if they are truth, asking if they are eternal, asking if they last beyond this ephemeral and doomed world.