The appearance of such individuals sends a tremor of reverence through people and nations, renews and swells society’s procession towards culture’s ancient, eternal temple, and always, every time, gives the temple itself a new and renewed splendour and meaning.
After the passage of such life-giving forces, humanity directs its best abilities towards culture, as it does towards the army after victorious wars, because their example establishes the most important thing: culture is an inexhaustible field of human endeavour. Inexhaustible because human conduct itself has no boundary. The allure of not being, not living, falling, being annihilated draws the human being into the dark silences of the abyss of nonexistence; the passion to live, conquer and endure eternally raises him to divine peals. The trajectory of descent is indefinable, and the boundary at which, through self-sacrifice, the human being grows from creature into creator is so high as to be invisible. And this vast expanse from silence to ringing, from fall to ascent, from creature to creator is the kingdom of the Word and the Word alone, filled with the play and theatre of people and societies, things and animals. Nothing and no one but the Word could rule over all of it.
Their name is Hovhannes Tumanyan or William Faulkner, Isahakyan or Alexander Pushkin, Cervantes, Mozart, Saryan, or… They are born in Kars or America, China or Brgnik. Like the mistress of an old extended family, Mother Nature places them in this great house of all humanity, in different languages under different names at different times, far from the evil eye, so that if chance restrains one, another elsewhere will surely unfold, surely shake himself free, surely take wing. For none of her other sons is assigned what they are to do. In their ominous absence the peals would grow cold, the colours fade, the air of the whole universe harden once more, as it was before the Word.
Thus they come forth and grow immense in one another’s place and for one another; thus they belong to themselves and everyone. Thus William Faulkner is ours too. His entry into our culture’s world of language, if it does not fill, at least points out the black void that was meant to erupt with light but is a black hole. Through hostility, and calculated hostility alone, in 1915 and then in 1937, the entire community of the free in our thought, courage and conscience was expelled from that cavern, led by Charents, Bakunts, Varuzhan, Siamanto, Teryan and Mahari.
His presence among us, that of his straightforwardly sharply defined inhabitants, hard as flint, is, if not obligatory, necessary, just as Shakespeare’s presence was and always is an obligatory necessity. We are opening a window onto his world far too late. But he was an American and a writer, and even ordinary Americans are a swift people: they live today today, and can even live tomorrow today. Our today, yesterday and tomorrow exist in that great American’s world, and it is fitting that those seemingly distant, seemingly past images should touch our eyes today, remind us today of our own debt to human honour and conscience. After that acquaintance with his world, we shall be different, loftier people than we were before entering his endlessly vast world.