Running for Your Life: The Overstory Story

This is going to be short – and oh, so sweet.

The first words that I read after turning the last page of “The Overstory” by Richard Powers appear in the 1954 Dell Laurel paperback edition (95 cents!) of “Six Great Modern Short Novels,” the preface to “The Bear” by William Faulkner, most of which contains remarks to honor the winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, to wit:

“It is [the writer’s] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding [her] of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of [her] past.”

What’s more, “This award is only mine in trust.”

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up.”

“Because of this the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

This is what “The Overstory” aspires to and succeeds in doing: realize the promise of Faulkner’s call for humility in service to the human spirit.

What “The Overstory” does 67 years after Faulkner penned these words is, through agony and sweat,  lift our hearts [and I daresay minds] during the interregnum of our annihilation.

Next: Running for Your Life: Tree Gait


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