Stranger in The Village
Time and time again I am constantly suprised by man's shining acomplishments, but also of thiers outrageous shortcomings. James Baldwin writes the perspectives of whites on Blacks in America versus those abroad. When James Baldwin visits the villag, the people there are taken with a kind of wonder but not somethign that can be contrued as being racist. He is confronted with the stark contrast of belief with that of his native home in America. He realizes that people can see the same thngs different ways. For hundreds if years in America the balck man was not even really considered human, but a piece of property. Only now in these modern times is this very same sentiment, not always the same but a constantly changing prejudice, staring to ebb and die. Baldwin writes " It is only now beginning ti be borne in in us-very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against out will-that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral highmindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp on reality. People who shut thier eyes to reality simply invite thier own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innoconce long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
Chew on that for awhile...
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2 comments:
The quote you use of Baldwin's sounds quite a bit like Adams' quote at the end of "Vis Inertiae"; he says, "One gazed mute before this ocean of darkest ignorance that had already engulfed society. Few centres of great energy lived in illusion more complete or archaic than Washington with its simple-minded standards of the field and farm, its Southern and Western habits of life and manners, its assumptions of ethics and history; but even in Washington, society was uneasy enough to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act the part of the horseshoe crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was uniform--that nothing changed" (57). (Aside: However, I also find this reference to "horseshoe crab" in terms of T. S. Eliot's reference to a similiar image at the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" intriguing in a similiar vein. It could be interesting to compare the 'character' Adams makes of himself to Prufrock.)
I've been thinking about it this weekend; I'm certain you're familiar with some of George Orwell's work: namely, Animal Farm, and maybe 1984. I think you'd really like his essays. Other than writing fiction, he was also a great journalist, and essayist.
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