Boy, was I thrilled! O Langston Hughes, adorable. I like the sentence "and to take it personally" as a good thing. Then a little thing here and there like "and they would dump it into the ice buckets if they could."

"She had been a swell friend and I liked her." Nothing much but all right with me.

Baldwin writes that he went to Paris because "I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.” This sentiment has such humble humanity that the esotericism and exoticism of say Eliot and Pound comes off cowardly. You have to admire Baldwin for rising above his “pride and contempt,” while putting to words the  “bitterly accumulated perception” with patience and something more, honesty rooted in love. His observations are keen and unique: [culture] was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they have been forced to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle of their great men with them has left them richer.” He investigates the “color problem” with the savoir faire of one who has long navigated those furious seas. His nuanced perceptions come from a good ear and intellect. His narratives are simultaneously inclusive and selective and have the ingenuity akin to the practices of Drs. Chekhov and Williams.

Interesting that Baldwin refers to the unsentimental French much as Gertrude Stein does but to a disparate argument. “And the fact, perhaps, that the French are the earth's least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of rehabilitation is scarcely real to them.” Compare this to what Stein writes "well that too is intelligent on the part of France and unsentimental, because after all the way everything is remembered is by the writers and painters of the period, nobody really lives who has not been well written about and in realising that the french show their usual sense of reality and a belief in a sense of reality is the twentieth century, people may not have it but they do believe in it."

Take it from Baldwin: White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

wham bam

Also shout out to the knitted sweater from a mono prix

"There is no structure he can build strong enough to keep out this self-knowledge."