--James Baldwin, "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962.
Sixty-one years ago this winter, James Baldwin wrote a lament and a love letter to our country. Because he loved deeply, he could not help but lament. Because he loved bravely, he dared to know and to tell the truth:
"We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.... All dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen and the panic, then, to which I have referred comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed."
"How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as, indeed, we seem to be, so empty and so desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?"
"The trouble is deeper than we wish to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation--we will never establish human communities--until we stare our ghastly failure in the face."
"Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves: this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes. This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility, and the necessity, of writers. It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred. It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic."
When we write, when we speak, when we love, let us, like our brother James Baldwin, be brave and be true. For his words are as bracing and healing today as they were sixty years ago: "Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
James Baldwin, "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962, pages 1 and 38.