音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:01.19]Passage 17. The Props to Help Man Endure (I)

[00:07.86]I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work,

[00:15.63]a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.

[00:19.79]Not for glory and least of all, for profit,

[00:23.29]but to create out of the material of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

[00:31.06]So this award is only mine in trust.

[00:34.23]It would not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it,

[00:39.16]commensurate for the purpose and significance of its origin.

[00:43.86]But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too

[00:47.80]by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to

[00:52.83]by the young men and woman,already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,

[00:58.85]among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.

[01:05.53]Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now

[01:13.51]that we can even bear it.

[01:15.37]There’re no longer problems of the spirit, there’s only the question;

[01:20.52]“When will I be blown up?”

[01:22.81]Because of this, the young man or woman writing today

[01:26.86]has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself,

[01:31.34]which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about,

[01:36.38]worth the agony and the sweat.

[01:39.00]He must learn them again, he must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid,

[01:45.68]and teaching himself that,forget it forever,

[01:49.18]leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart.

[01:55.42]The old universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed:

[02:01.43]love and honor and pity and pride,

[02:03.84]and compassion and sacrifice.