The writer 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 honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.
-William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech, 1950
Once, immersed as we all are in the hectic daily round of mostly trivial happenings, hurrahs and harassments, which make up life, in a moment of respite I read an extract from the Polish writer Gustaw Hurling’s Journal Written at Night about a meeting he once had with a fellow writer, the great Italian novelist Ignazio Silone.
