I was struck by a phrase in President-elect Obama’s remarks to the throng who’d gathered for today’s “We Are One” extravaganza at the Lincoln Memorial.  After saying that few generations have confronted the kind of challenges we face today, and warning that meeting these manifold challenges will take not months but years, Obama asserted,

“But despite all of this — despite the enormity of the task that lies ahead — I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that it will prevail, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time.”

My first reaction was — gee, that’s a curious choice of words.  Of course the United States will endure.  Even with Iraq,  the financial meltdown, and everything else, “enduring” really isn’t our problem.

But then my mom, an English professor, reminded me of this — William Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance speech, delivered in 1950. Faulkner, speaking to a traumatized world that feared the threat of nuclear annihilation, declared,

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.  The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

Was Obama deliberately channeling Faulkner?  Who knows — though he’d recently heard this same speech quoted by his Energy Secretary-designate, Stephen Chu.  But replace the word “poet”  with “President” and I think it offers a lovely insight on the role Barack Obama’s words played today and, we hope, will play for us all on January 20