SATURDAY RUBRICS: 11/30/24

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” ― Albert Einstein

BEFORE GOOGLE: James Baldwin

(Above: Baldwin photographed by Avedon. 1946,)

That Einstein quote beneath the RUBRICS title is one I often think about in this mostly solitary life I now lead as a pilgrim in the world. It is the same solitude in which my youth was centered but has taken on the contours of a kind of romantic parter now that it is what accompanies me on this life for which every departure is an arrival. As I was taking one of my long, solitary walks which have become a feature of my days no matter where I am - now in Vienna until January when I then return to London for a few months - I thought about others who might have had their own romance with their own solitude as it became their traveling companion when they set out to make a name for themselves in the wider world. Or is that kind of solitude as wide as the world itself and we all, we solitary types, just step into it to take our places within it. It’s not ours. We’re its.

“And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had,” wrote James Baldwin in Just Above My Head, his last novel which he wrote at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. “I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it. You attach yourself to someone, or you allow someone to attach themselves to you. This person is not for you, and you, really, are not for that person--and that's it, son. But you try, you both try. The only result of all your trying is to make absolutely real the unconquerable distance between you: to dramatize, in a million ways, the absolutely unalterable truth of this distance. Side by side, and hand in hand, your sunsets, nevertheless are not occurring in the same universe. It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other. Your elements will not mix, unless one agrees that the elements be pulverized--and the result of that is worse than being alone. The result of that is to become one of the living dead. The most dreadful people I have ever known are those who have been ‘saved,’ as they claim, by Christ--they could not possibly be more deluded--those for whom the heavenly telephone is endlessly ringing, always with disastrous messages for everybody else. Or those people who have been cured by their psychiatrists, a cure which has rendered them a little less exciting than oatmeal. I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach--or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years.”

(Above: Baldwin photographed by Steve Schapiro. 1963.)

(Above: Baldwin talking to a young boy in New Orleans. 1963. Photograph by Steve Schapiro.)

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