The Past is Never Dead. It's Not Even Past

Of course, the title is not mine. It is from the mind and work of William Faulkner. It appears in the sequel to Sanctuary, Requiem for a Nun, written twenty years after its prequel and a year after Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I am often asked what my favorite novel is or who my favorite writer is. I have trouble with questions like those for a simple reason. There are too many great novels and too many equally great writers. However, if I were forced to limit my choice to one writer, it would be William Faulkner. I come back to him time after time. He is a safe harbor in challenging times, a touchstone, a place to ground one’s thinking and perspective.

Even then, I would be hard-pressed to name one novel from him or the many other incredible novels from other writers. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is high on my list, but how does one accurately compare it to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, or even Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Four Souls by Louise Erdrich. We move, our thinking moves; we change. Choice and favorites depend on time and circumstance.

By now, you must be asking, “What is the point of this?” The point is this: How do we find sense in this unimaginable time in our history, in our lives, in the life of our nation, in the life of a democracy won by the labor and blood of millions before us? How do we continue to believe that truth matters, that civil behavior matters, and “that justice for all” is anything more than a line in a commercial jingle designed by some ad huckster to sell an idea?

I am no less disappointed that Donald Trump will be inaugurated in a few days than I was in 2016. However, I am more shocked. I am appalled that in the face of what we know, of what is clear and obvious about who and what Donald Trump is, millions of Americans voted for him. I am shocked that a felon who could not get a job in my workplace will be our President.

I have been absent in this space since the election. I have mourned for our country. I have tried to understand how anyone – never mind millions – how anyone could have voted for Donald Trump. I have been angry, angry that the sacrifices of young Americans in WWII who died to defend democracy have been tossed aside like overused confetti. I have been quiet, thinking about what happened to our country and our people. I have been quiet, thinking about how Christianity veered so far away from the message of Jesus Christ and became jaded into a message far removed from the red-letter words of the New Testament. I have been quiet, thinking about the future of this nation and the future of my grandchildren and beyond.

In crises, we look to touchstones, and for me, one is William Faulkner. The words in the title, a quote from Faulkner, speak from a past we thought we had overcome. In Faulkner, the past is rarely just historical detail—it is a living force shaping destinies. In his 1950 Nobel speech, he exhorted writers to face fear and upheaval by returning to these critical human truths: that truth matters, that freedom matters, that justice matters, that common decency matters, that equality matters, that love matters. That we must do; all of us must face fear and upheaval.

We have become inured to the idea that Faulkner spoke to when he said, “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?” He spoke of nuclear war. Most of us have lived every second of our lives with this hanging over us. He said further, “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 ding-dong 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.”

Our nation stands on the brink of an abyss. We are hanging by a frayed thread to a past that moved a nation haltingly to meet and fulfill the words of our founding documents. The abyss is defined for us. We hear it in the words of Trump, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, and all the billionaires and Trumpers who advocate the abhorrent changes we face. We face the radical shift from “We the People” and “all men are created equal” to a nation that our predecessors would neither approve of nor recognize. Our country, our future, is in our hands. What is it that we do now?

I turn to Faulkner. “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.”