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A review by musaup
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin
5.0
"Was he free? We he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard." - W.H. Auden
"Memory, especially as one grows older, can do strange and disquieting things. Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more stretched behind than stretches before one, some assessments have to be made. Between what one wished to become and what has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one's final margin, one's last opportunity for creation. And between the self as it is, and the self as one sees it, there's also a distance, even harder to gauge. Some of us are compelled, around the middle of our lives, to make study of this baffling geography, less in the hope of conquering these distances than in the determination that the distances shall not become any greater. Chasms are necessary, but they can also notoriously, be fatal. At this point, one is attempting nothing less than the recreation of oneself out of the rubble which has become one's life."
This book was incredible.
"Memory, especially as one grows older, can do strange and disquieting things. Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more stretched behind than stretches before one, some assessments have to be made. Between what one wished to become and what has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one's final margin, one's last opportunity for creation. And between the self as it is, and the self as one sees it, there's also a distance, even harder to gauge. Some of us are compelled, around the middle of our lives, to make study of this baffling geography, less in the hope of conquering these distances than in the determination that the distances shall not become any greater. Chasms are necessary, but they can also notoriously, be fatal. At this point, one is attempting nothing less than the recreation of oneself out of the rubble which has become one's life."
This book was incredible.