Month: September 2008

Yesterday was the birthday of Willliam Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949.  He gave one of the most ever quoted Nobel Prize acceptance speeches. The context of the speech was the cold war and the threat of atomic annihilation.

Apparently, the speech wasn’t much hailed on the day it was given. That may have been because Faulkner didn’t deliver it particularly well, reading it quickly into the microphone without much expression.  You can listen to a portion of the original recording of it below in the YouTube clip.

It was only when the speech was reprinted and read widely, that it was considered one of the greatest ever Nobel speeches. 

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? 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 old 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, of 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.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. 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 dingdong 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. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

“If the wind comes from an empty cave, it’s not without a reason.”

“The old horse in the stable still yearns to run 500 miles.”

Such Chinese proverbs are becoming the rage of the corporate boardroom according to an article in the on-line magazine Slate.   

The article describes a business conference in Aspen, Co. that featured speeches on a variety of issues. According to the author, at times the conference became a contest in who could cite the best Chinese proverb.

China’s influence was especially apparent in the language used throughout the conference. At a panel on alternative energy, Lawrence Bender, a producer of “An Inconvenient Truth”, opened his spiel with a Chinese proverb: “When the wind rises, some people build walls. Others build windmills.” Panelist David Hawkins,  a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, countered with another Chinese proverb: “When is the best time to plant a tree? A hundred years ago. When is the second-best time to plant a tree? Yesterday.” (The exchange occasioned much sage nodding of heads.) At another panel, an executive explained the reluctance of Western firms to engage in aggressive public relations in the new market by noting, “In China, they say tall flowers are cut down.”

What we love about the use of Chinese proverbs is that they are often slightly mysterious and therefore require that the speaker tell the story behind the proverb.  And as anyone who has worked with Speechworks knows, we love stories. 

For example, the quote “If the wind comes from an empty cave, it’s not without a reason” is about trying to understand mysterious incidents. If your business sees something odd happening, chances are that there is a reason. The key, of course, is to try to figure out the reason.

So in your next speech, consider tossing in some sage wisdom from the Chinese.  It might work. Or as the sage said: “Be not afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid only of standing still.”