I have always read James Baldwin with admiration both for his superb style but also because as a child of the church he never gave up on hope despite the brutalities of American Jim Crow and its many afterbirths. One of Baldwin’s observations sticks with me:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
This observation exceeds my meager capacity for summary. It’s simply too profound. And true. But if you want a pithy rejoinder here’s a line by the poet James Wright:
“I’ll be damned, you’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”
So here’s a semi-Horatian chestnut:
Optimism has nothing to do with sentimentality.
This is better in the original Latin. But of you can’t look it up because the ancients didn’t recognize hopefulness. It was Leibniz who first coughed it up. (I love Voltaire’s version of him in “Candide”—Pangloss claiming this is the best of all possible worlds even as the Bulgarians keep reappearing to torch the town and steal the women.
I’ve always loved Whitman’s optimism but I’m more persuaded by Baldwin.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
