"Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain"
About this Quote
Faulkner’s line is a dare aimed at the soft modern fantasy that the highest good is comfort. Pain, here, isn’t fetishized as virtue; it’s framed as proof of contact with reality. “Nothing” is the real antagonist: numbness, erasure, the blank anesthetic of a life unmarked by stakes. In a Faulkner universe, to choose nothing is to choose the kind of silence that keeps families rotting in place, history unspoken, guilt unaccounted for. Pain at least testifies that something happened.
The intent is almost puritanical in its severity, but the subtext is Southern and specifically Faulknerian: a culture haunted by what it refuses to name. His novels are crowded with characters trying to outrun memory, inheritance, race, and shame, and failing spectacularly. Pain becomes a form of narrative integrity. It forces recognition; it drags the past into the room. Nothing, by contrast, is the seductive lie of clean breaks and fresh starts, a myth Faulkner spent a career dismantling with looping sentences and time that won’t behave.
The line also works as a writer’s credo. For Faulkner, experience is material, even when it cuts. Pain means texture, consequence, complication - the raw inputs of art. To pick pain over nothing is to pick a life that can be told, not merely survived. It’s grim, yes, but it’s also an insistence that consciousness beats emptiness.
The intent is almost puritanical in its severity, but the subtext is Southern and specifically Faulknerian: a culture haunted by what it refuses to name. His novels are crowded with characters trying to outrun memory, inheritance, race, and shame, and failing spectacularly. Pain becomes a form of narrative integrity. It forces recognition; it drags the past into the room. Nothing, by contrast, is the seductive lie of clean breaks and fresh starts, a myth Faulkner spent a career dismantling with looping sentences and time that won’t behave.
The line also works as a writer’s credo. For Faulkner, experience is material, even when it cuts. Pain means texture, consequence, complication - the raw inputs of art. To pick pain over nothing is to pick a life that can be told, not merely survived. It’s grim, yes, but it’s also an insistence that consciousness beats emptiness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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