Okay, confession time, dear reader: if you’re reading this on December 13th, congratulations – you’re three days late to the party, just like me (and frankly, just like Faulkner would’ve preferred).  But hey, what’s a Nobel speech anniversary without a little tardiness and existential disarray?  Time is a flat circle, calendars are a social construct, and whiskey tastes the same on any day ending in Y.
So, let’s rewind to December 10th, 1949, and picture it: in the icy, buttoned-up heart of Stockholm, a gaggle of Nordic royalty and tuxedoed stiff-shirts are waiting.  Waiting for a small, mustachioed man from the humid, gothic morass of Mississippi to stumble up to a podium, likely completely shit-housed, and accept the shiniest of all literary hood ornaments: the Nobel Prize.  The man is William Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury and cartographer of the broken human soul, and he very nearly told them to all to shove it.
This whole affair, this trans-Atlantic flight into the glacial maw of European high culture, was, for Faulkner, the type of bullshitty literary root canal he had zero intention of undergoing.  The man hated speeches.  Hated them with a passion usually reserved for tax collectors and people who dog-ear pages.  His initial, and let’s be honest, deeply admirable plan was to dispatch a two-sentence telegram.  Something along the lines of, “Fuck off.  I’m busy.” and then get back to the serious business of drinking whiskey and wrestling sentences into submission.
But pressure, for some  people, can be a hell of a thing.  Family, friends, maybe the ghost of Conrad himself, they all conspired.  So Bill gets on the goddamn plane, a tweed-clad ghost haunting the fuselage, probably already marinating his liver for the ordeal ahead.  He arrives in Stockholm, a place as alien to his Rowan Oak porch as a Marian landscape, and proceeds to do what any sane man would do when faced with a week of stilted small talk and ceremonial pomp: he gets absolutely, unequivocally hammered.
And then comes the moment.  The culmination of a year-long delay and a lifetime of torturing typewriters.  He’s shuffled to the dais, looking less like a literary titan and more like a man searching for the nearest exit and a stiff drink.  The world holds its breath, expecting a mumbled thank you, a polite nod, and a quick escape.
What they get instead is five minutes of pure, uncut, lightning-in-a-bottle prophecy.  This titan of tragedy, this man who writes novels so dense with despair you could drown in them, stands up there, swaying, and delivers the single most potent dose of secular scripture in modern history.  He talks about the atom bomb, the fear, the universal dread hanging over everyone like a shroud.  Here’s the core:
“I feel that this award is not made to me as a man, but to my work…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…
I decline to accept the end of man…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.”
It’s a speech so powerful, so fundamentally at odds with the bleakness of his own work, that it feels like a cosmic joke and a profound truth all at once.  Faulkner, in that moment, becomes the reluctant prophet of postwar literature.  He tells the world that the writer’s duty is to remind humanity of its courage, its honor, its hope, and its capacity for compassion.  He says this while still metabolizing a truly heroic amount of whiskey.
He drops the mic, pockets the prize money, fucks off back to Mississippi , and goes right back to writing labyrinthine masterpieces that most of America wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.  Back to the porch and the typewriter and the dogs and the ghosts.
He keeps writing.
Books that no one buys.
Books that confuse people.
Books that bleed.
So today, we raise a glass (cheap bourbon preferred, neat, no ice) to the man who took the Nobel, told the world to get its shit together, and then went back to the swamp to keep doing the work.
He didn’t endure.
He prevailed.
And he did it broke, drunk, and brilliant.

N.P.: “Bellum Terrae Mediae” – Dogukan Ozturk