Note: We woke this morn­ing to the news that Toni Mor­ri­son, the Nobel Prize-win­ning author, has died at age 88. We will pay prop­er trib­ute to her in upcom­ing posts. Below find a favorite from our archive, a look inside her poet­ic 1993 Nobel Prize accep­tance speech.

Since her first nov­el, 1970’s The Bluest Eye, Toni Mor­ri­son has daz­zled read­ers with her com­mand­ing language—colloquial, mag­i­cal, mag­is­te­r­i­al, even fan­ci­ful at times, but held firm to the earth by a com­mit­ment to his­to­ry and an unspar­ing explo­ration of racism, sex­u­al abuse, and vio­lence. Read­ing Mor­ri­son can be an exhil­a­rat­ing expe­ri­ence, and a har­row­ing one. We nev­er know where she is going to take us. But the jour­ney for Mor­ri­son has nev­er been one of escapism or art for art’s sake. In a 1981 inter­view, she once said, “the books I want­ed to write could not be only, even mere­ly, lit­er­ary or I would defeat my pur­pos­es, defeat my audi­ence.” As she put it then, “my work bears wit­ness and sug­gests who the out­laws were, who sur­vived under what cir­cum­stances and why.”

She has sus­tained such a weighty mis­sion not only with a love of lan­guage, but also with a crit­i­cal under­stand­ing of its power—to seduce, to manip­u­late, con­found, wound, twist, and kill. Which brings us to the record­ed speech above, deliv­ered in 1993 at her accep­tance of the Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture. After briefly thank­ing the Swedish Acad­e­my and her audi­ence, she begins, “Fic­tion has nev­er been enter­tain­ment for me.” Wind­ing her speech around a para­ble of “an old woman, blind but wise,” Mor­ri­son illus­trates the ways in which “oppres­sive lan­guage does more than rep­re­sent vio­lence; it is vio­lence; does more than rep­re­sent the lim­its of knowl­edge; it lim­its knowl­edge.”

Anoth­er kind of lan­guage takes flight, “surges toward knowl­edge, not its destruc­tion.” In the folk­tale at the cen­ter of her speech, lan­guage is a bird, and the blind seer to whom it is pre­sent­ed gives us a choice: “I don’t know whether the bird you are hold­ing is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

Lan­guage, she sug­gests, is in fact our only human pow­er, and our respon­si­bil­i­ty. The con­se­quences of its mis­use we know all too well, and Mor­ri­son does not hes­i­tate to name them. But she ends with a chal­lenge for her audi­ence, and for all of us, to take our own mea­ger lit­er­ary resources and put them to use in heal­ing the dam­age done. You should lis­ten to, and read, her entire speech, with its maze-like turns and folds. Near its end, the dis­cur­sive­ness flow­ers into exhor­ta­tion, and—though she has said she dis­likes hav­ing her work described thus—poetry. “Make up a sto­ry,” she says, “Nar­ra­tive is rad­i­cal, cre­at­ing us at the very moment it is being cre­at­ed.”

We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and noth­ing is left but their scald. Or if, with the ret­i­cence of a sur­geon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can nev­er do it prop­er­ly — once and for all. Pas­sion is nev­er enough; nei­ther is skill. But try. For our sake and yours for­get your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unrav­els fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blind­ness, can speak the lan­guage that tells us what only lan­guage can: how to see with­out pic­tures. Lan­guage alone pro­tects us from the scari­ness of things with no names. Lan­guage alone is med­i­ta­tion

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Toni Mor­ri­son Dis­pens­es Writ­ing Wis­dom in 1993 Paris Review Inter­view

7 Nobel Speech­es by 7 Great Writ­ers: Hem­ing­way, Faulkn­er, and More

Toni Mor­ri­son, Nora Ephron, and Dozens More Offer Advice in Free Cre­ative Writ­ing “Mas­ter Class”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Maybe we take it for grant­ed that Virgil’s Roman epic, the Aeneid, is a sequel—long delayed—of Homer’s Ili­ad, a clas­si­cal adven­ture in verse, part leg­endary his­to­ry, part fan­ta­sy, part myth. It is all these things, of course, but it also served some very spe­cif­ic pur­pos­es for its time, the impe­r­i­al Rome of Augus­tus, Virgil’s patron, on whose insis­tence the Aeneid was pub­lished after the poet’s death. (Vir­gil him­self want­ed the man­u­script burned.) The Aeneid was also polit­i­cal and reli­gious pro­pa­gan­da.

Pla­to famous­ly railed against Homer and oth­er ancient poets for triv­i­al­iz­ing reli­gion by turn­ing the gods into venge­ful, pet­ty soap opera char­ac­ters. Vir­gil and Augus­tus, on the oth­er hand, explic­it­ly hoped the Aeneid would effect “a revival of faith in the old-time reli­gion,” as Clyde Pharr writes in the intro­duc­tion to his Latin edi­tion of the poem. “The edu­cat­ed Romans of the day were becom­ing quite blasé and sophis­ti­cat­ed and were grad­u­al­ly los­ing the faith of their fathers with its sim­ple, unques­tion­ing reliance on the infal­li­ble wis­dom of the gods and their help­ful inter­fer­ence in human affairs.”

Roman reli­gion was, how­ev­er, not mys­te­ri­ous or remote but “intense­ly prac­ti­cal,” busy­ing itself “with the every­day life of the peo­ple.” By this token, the faith Augus­tus want­ed to pro­mote was also intense­ly polit­i­cal, encour­ag­ing strict patri­ar­chal hier­ar­chies and a sense of sacred duty, the chief hero­ic bur­den Aeneus must bear—his pietas. Vir­gil wrote his hero, Mark Robin­son argues in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above, as a mod­el for Augus­tus, who appears in the poem when Aeneus descends into the under­world and has a vision of the future of Rome.

Augus­tus is pre­sent­ed “as a vic­tor enter­ing Rome in tri­umph… expand­ing the Roman empire.” He is hailed as “only the third Roman leader in 700 years to shut the doors of the tem­ple of Janus, sig­ni­fy­ing the arrival of per­ma­nent peace. But there’s a twist.” Augus­tus did not read to the end, and appar­ent­ly did not notice Aeneus’s many flaws, dra­ma­tized, Robin­son sug­gests, as a warn­ing to the emper­or, or his sub­jects.

In sec­tions “that could be seen as crit­i­cal, if not sub­tly sub­ver­sive of the emperor’s achieve­ments,” Aeneus strug­gles to “bal­ance mer­cy and jus­tice.” The hero arrives as a refugee from the con­quered Troy, car­ry­ing his aging father on his back and lead­ing his young son by the hand. He ends, pro­lep­ti­cal­ly, by found­ing the great empire to come. But as many schol­ars have argued, through­out the poem “Vir­gil under­mined the sense of glo­ri­ous progress, or even over­turned it,” as Made­line Miller writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly.

This mod­ern read­ing of the Aeneid may be con­tro­ver­sial, but the cel­e­bra­tion of Augus­tus was embraced not only by the emper­or him­self but by ambi­tious rulers “as dis­parate as Eliz­a­beth I, Louis XIV, and Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni,” not to men­tion “the Found­ing Fathers, who gen­er­al­ly pre­ferred Homer.” Per­haps the poem’s endorse­ment by those in pow­er and those posi­tioned to flat­ter them has long col­ored the recep­tion of the Aeneid as an uncrit­i­cal cel­e­bra­tion of empire.

The Aeneid is a foun­da­tion­al epic in the West­ern lit­er­ary tra­di­tion because of Virgil’s unde­ni­able poet­ic skill in adapt­ing clas­si­cal Greek forms into Latin, and because of its influ­ence on hun­dreds of poets and writ­ers for hun­dreds of years after. But per­haps, Robin­son sug­gests, “in want­i­ng the sto­ry pub­lished, Augus­tus had been fooled by his own desire for self-pro­mo­tion.” Maybe the poem has also “sur­vived to ask ques­tions about the nature of pow­er and author­i­ty ever since” it was first pub­lished, to instant acclaim, in 19 BC.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,600-Year-Old Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script of the Aeneid Dig­i­tized & Put Online by The Vat­i­can

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness