About a month ago, we posted a reflection on a stunning illustration of saving grace that occurs in John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. Those who attended this past weekend’s conference in Charlottesville know that Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 “for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga.” The author sadly fell ill prior to the ceremony and was unable to accept in person. But the speech he wrote for the occasion lives on. Here’s one particularly poignant excerpt:
“We do not know what is coming to the civilization in which we still play our parts… The surface indications are such as may bewilder newspaper prophets and whatever God there may be in the sky. But there is one constant element — human nature. The tides and currents of human feeling and of human conduct change with a speed which may best be compared with that of glaciers, or even of the mountains where those glaciers form. I would dare hazard the opinion that the field of life before us writers, twenty years hence, will, save for the colour of the grass, be practically what it is today.”
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