Before the Final Signature

The world, as scores of orators were testifying at commencements across the U.S., is in a sorry mess. But what is really wrong? And what can be done? Last week one answer came from a man who had gone to Wellesley, Mass, to see his daughter Jill, 19, graduate from Pine Manor Junior College. Said Novelist William (Sanctuary) Faulkner:

"What is wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet ... It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, 'It is finished. We made it, and it works.' Because only man can complete it. Not God, but man. It is not only man's high destiny, but proof of his immortality, too, that his is the choice between ending the world . . . and completing it."

Most Valuable Things. "In the beginning, God created the earth . . . Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth . . . Then God stopped. It was not an experiment. God didn't merely believe in man, He knew man. He knew that man was competent for a soul because he was capable of saving that soul. He knew that man was capable of saving not only his soul but himself . . . That man was . . . capable ... of teaching himself to be civilized ... He demanded of man only that we work to deserve and gain these things--liberty, freedom of the body and spirit both, security for the weak and helpless and peace and freedom for all--because these were the most valuable things He could set within our capacity and reach.

"During all this, the angels . . . merely looked on and watched . . . except that one--the splendid dark incorrigible one, who possessed the arrogance and pride to demand with, and the temerity to object with, and the ambition to substitute with ... So God even used the ambition. He already presaw the long roster of the ambition's ruthless avatars--Genghis and Caesar . . . and Stalin and Bonaparte and Huey Long . . .

"He not only used the ambition and the ruthlessness and the arrogance to show man what to revolt against, He used the temerity to revolt and the will to change what one does not like too. Because he presaw the long roster of the other avatars . . . the long annal of the men and women who have anguished over man's condition and who have held up to us not only the mirror of our follies and greeds and lusts and fears, but have reminded us constantly of the tremendous shape of our godhead too ... of our capacity for honor and courage and compassion and pity and sacrifice ..."

Not Easy but Simple. "But it is we ourselves who must employ [these things] . . . simple men and women simply and mutually confederated for a time, a purpose, an end . . . The answer is very simple. I don't mean easy, but simple . . . The end does not even require that we dedicate ourselves from this moment on to be Joans of Arc with trumpets and banners and battle dust ... It can be done within . . . the normal life which everyone wants and everyone should have . . . Because it begins at home.

"Home is not necessarily a place fixed in geography. It can be a rented room. But it must be all the rooms or apartments; all the houses on that street and all the streets in that association of streets until they become a whole, an integer, of people who have the same aspirations and hopes and problems and duties . . ."

Where We Live. "It will not be easy, of course: just simple. Let us think first of ... saving, the integer ... we call home. In fact, we must break ourselves of thinking in the empty and clanging terms of ... 'fatherland' or 'race' or 'color' or 'creed' . . . Home: not where I live . . . but where we live: a thousand then tens of thousands of little integers scattered and fixed firmer and more impregnable and more solid than rocks or citadels about the earth, so that the ruthless and ambitious split-offs of the ancient dark spirit shall look at the one and say, 'There is nothing for us here,' then look further, at the rest of them fixed and founded like fortresses . . . and say, 'There is nothing for us any more anywhere. Man--simple, unfrightened, invincible men and women --has beaten us.' Then man can put that final signature to his job and say, 'We finished it, and it works.' "

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