After we toured author William Faulkner’s home, I asked students in my creative writing class how the great writer felt about mankind’s capacity for endurance, to which a student replied, “He summed it in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature: ‘I believe man will not merely endure; he will prevail.’”
Another great thinker, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird defined man’s capacity for endurance by living it, day by day. When I was ten years old, my father, a Mississippi Delta farmer, turned me over to the old black man and told him to teach me how to work. I didn’t even know what endurance meant, and certainly didn’t have enough of it to withstand long workdays. I learned; Jaybird saw to that.
