We might have heard it this week.
About 27 different times.
The last dingdong of doom.
In fact, humankind (which is an oxymoron) have been hearing the Chimes of Midnight since we went bi-pedal if not before.
I had a professor in college who one day during a lecture used the phrase.
The last dingdong of doom.
I was paying attention in class and I laughed out loud. It's a funny sequence of words.
He came at me. "Do you know what that's from?"
I didn't.
The next class or the next class after that, he had a record-player sitting on his desk.
He played the entirety of William Faulkner's "Banquet Speech." When he accepted the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The speech, which I've printed and linked to below, is not for lightweights. And Faulkner's voice and delivery aren't the easiest to listen to. What's more, Faulkner is a writer you don't "breeze" through. You have to read and re-read and think unravel complex ideas. He wouldn't make it today. He's not TLDR. He's worse than that. He's TLDT. (Too long, demands thought.)
BTW, if tump speaks at a fourth grade level, Faulkner is at a 24th-grade level. It's not complexity for complexity's sake. It's complexity in the service of explaining life in all its messy noise.
In any event, below is Faulkner's speech.
I was talking to a friend on Wednesday morning, a surpassingly intelligent and literate planner. I mentioned Faulkner's speech and how it was shaped and shaded by the existential fear of what seemed like incipient nuclear annihilation. The United States had exploded an h-bomb. The Soviets were on their way to exploding theirs. An iron-curtain had descended across Europe. A lot of megatons were chomping at the bit.
The speech in four words can be summed up as:
Stand up to fear.
Today, I believe, we are facing a fear of technological annihilation. The axing of 10,000 ad people earlier this week and the wholesale destruction of our industry along with most of all of human-ness in communication is the result of this fear. That fear is the fear of the insignificant-izing of people. That really only twelve or twenty-two hyper rich men matter.
We've forgotten to stand up to fear.
And our current politics and the constant onslaught of "news" and pings and hyperbole and catastrophe enflame the fire of fear.
I wondered instead if I could re-cast Faulkner's address. And substitute the current fear of Tech Dominance for his fear of H. Edited for length.
Below is his.
Below that, in italics, is mine.
William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950 *
Ladies and gentlemen,
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.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
...There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be replaced? When will my 'self' disappear. When will my soul be subsumed by the big money and bigger greed that has turned most of our planet into a slag heap? The young man or woman creating today has been victimized by a trillion dollars of messages telling them that humanity, that soul, that life itself doesn't matter.
We must learn again that we do matter. We must teach ourselves that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching ourselves that, forget fear forever.
Until we do so, we labor under a curse. We write 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. Our griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. We write not of the heart but of the glands.
Until we relearn that only humans can create. That only humans with our six-trillion synapses and four-million-years of struggle on this planet can create, imagine, explore and discover. Until we relearn this, we will write as though we stood and watched the end of mankind. I decline to accept the end of us and the rise of robots.
It is easy enough to say that we are immortal simply because we 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 mankind will not merely endure: we will prevail. We are immortal, not because we alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because we have a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. We alone. Not Musk. Not Bezos. Not Altman. Not algorithm.
The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is our privilege to help mankind endure by lifting hearts, by reminding all of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of mankind, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help us endure and prevail.
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And, BTW.
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