Prevail
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."
What if two roads diverged in a wood and both were virtually unpassable and might actually be dangerous and perhaps lead nowhere? Take the one least bad? Or don’t take either? Common sense might say turn back. But that isn’t always possible and likely less desirable.
In life we are often wise to take the least bad of the available alternatives. This is especially true in politics and government. We don’t teach this, but probably we should. Each new generation of citizens will benefit from this knowledge.
And if they don’t? There are three traps out there that are inviting missteps. First is the shock of realization. The world isn’t a nicely contrived puzzle. Some finding this out, pick up their pieces and go home. Poorly prepared people are easily offended by a real world that doesn’t meet childhood’s expectation. How often have I heard, I’m apolitical, I don’t get involved with politics. They are all crooked. Both candidates are “politicians.”
There is heat in the kitchen and a day or two in a sausage factory can put you off hotdogs. But there is still work to be done.
But there are worse traps. When you listen to only one side, they will either over praise their wisdom and virtue or expose you to the very depths of the other sides depravity. Essentially this means that you get very little useful information. Exaggerated claims don’t warn of the risks or show the limitations of success. Exaggerated fears turn you away from possible gains and do not strengthen you to pay the price of success.
Of course, there is no perfect candidate for office and no plan of action or inaction without cost and uncertainty.
Intelligent citizenship is not for amateurs. And yet a belief in the virtues of democracy expects just such a professional job from every adult. Think about this long enough and you have every reason to be discouraged. For democracy to work, amateurs have to be professionals. At least at critical moments in a nation’s history.
And that means sober evaluation of the choices offered by each party and cause and group. That means full recognition that signs of glitter don’t mean fields of gold and clods of dung on the ground can mean fertile fields.
It means that the future like the past is uncertain, hard to turn, bitter to experience, ripe for personal exploitation and demanding of dedicated effort by those who believe as Faulkner said in his Nobel address that humankind is destined not merely to survive but to prevail.
[I am interpreting man and men as meaning human and humans. I refuse to lose the beauty or integrity of the quotation by making substitutions or withdrawing it altogether. My apologies to those I offend.]
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.
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.
I find so many of us today with the same trembling of the spirit that Faulkner felt at the height of the Cold War when atomic destruction hung on a fragile thread above us.
Take his words as meaning that all of us, man and woman, will “prevail,” treasuring all the earth and its beauty and its many forms of life as our heritage and our responsibility.