blundershelf's review
challenging
hopeful
informative
5.0
Never has anyone done it quite like Baldwin. This was my introduction to his work and it took me years to finish because of the depth and power of his words. It's truly startling to read essays that wouldn't be out of place in a 2023 release that he wrote over sixty years ago.
musaup's review against another edition
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.
jessandhershelf's review against another edition
5.0
James Baldwin was an extraordinary writer. There is nothing better than reading his works.