Faulkner's final paragraph includes this optimistic assertion: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."

ASK HN: What book (by any author, and from any era) stands out to you that does what Faulkner describes here?

“[Man] 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.”

Faulker lore: he didn’t want to attend this ceremony. He wrote the speech in the plane while he was drunk. And quickly delivered the speech drunk and mumbling.

...in a heavy, almost incomprehensible (to his audience) southern accent.

History doesn't repeat but boy does it rhyme.

That was very stirring. Thank you.

So good! Thanks for the share.

>but truly beautiful code/language is as simple as possible

code and literary prose aren't interchangeable, not everything in the world ought to be approached through the lens of programming.

Code is, unless someone decides to make a language purely for aesthetic purposes, designed to solve technical problems, prose is not.

Maximalist art has a long history. It engulfs the reader, it's deliberately not utilitarian. It's often also a reaction to the sort of plain, monks cave style writing of a lot of American authors. Faulkner certainly falls into that category, but also Pynchon, Wallace, and so on.

what you're criticizing is what a lot of people love about faulkner. he had beef with hemingway because of how simple his sentences were, and hemingway made the same critiques about faulkner as you have. an argument could be made that faulkner's prose was the antithesis of hemingway. or hemingway was the antithesis of faulkner. either way, they're both poets in a sense, and your preference is up to your own subjective taste.

you get a glimpse of it in this speech: "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."

so beautiful! especially, "the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening" -- to me, that's very lyrical. only a poet can do that. and in that paragraph, he repeats "last" three times, which adds a nice cadence and rhythm.

i personally like faulkner's prose. it's especially refreshing to read in 2021 when everything is written in plain, simple english. not everything is some code or a README.

are you talking about the language in this speech or in his novels?

overwrought is not a word i knew. a "wrought" thing is made in a particular way, or made by effort and artistry, and an "overwrought" thing is overly complex or elaborate.

You can say, "a novel she wrought" or the novel was "well wrought". Presumably "she wrought a novel" is also fine. Its like a generalised "made something using skills".

"Beautifully wrought code". Although I reckon most reading it would just think you can't spell.