Faulkner

O americano William Faulkner é um dos meus escritores de estimação. Sua tão admirada inventidade narrativa não me fascina por si só; invejo o uso que ele faz dela, penetrando nas frestas da consciência humana, na percepção dos conflitos e das dores que mais angustiam o homem. Com Faulkner (e outros poucos), a linguagem deixa de ser um empecilho para a literatura - e vira um bisturi para expôr as entranhas da alma.

Estava lendo agora há pouco seu discurso na cerimônia de entrega do prêmio Nobel. Alguns excertos:

"The writer 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."

"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. "

"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."