If You’re Trying to Avoid Reality, How Can You Face Your Life?
James Baldwin in Two Little Known Gems.
Amanda Stern
July 31, 2024
 | You’re reading How to Live—an inquiry into the psychological forces that shape us, and how to stop being run by them. Through deep research, personal storytelling, and hard-won insight, I challenge the myth of normalcy and offer new ways to face old struggles. This work is reader-supported. If it speaks to you, consider a paid subscription for deeper insight, off-the-record writing, and seasonal in-person gatherings. You can also donate any amount. |
If You’re Trying to Avoid Reality, How Can You Face Your Life?
The literary icon, civil rights activist and glorious public orator, James Baldwin, would be 100 years old this Friday, August 2nd, 2024.
I have been a “Baldy” (Trademark Pending!) since 1985, when I was assigned Go Tell it On the Mountain, Notes to a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time in the 10th grade.
Baldwin believed, as I do, that we cannot change what we don’t face.
For the uninitiated, Baldwin was an American-born intellectual whose novels, poems, essays, dialogues, and debates explore the societal conditioning of hierarchical structures based on race, sexuality, and class.
As a black, gay intellectual in 1940s America, Baldwin was an outcast his entire life.
He consistently argued that the issue of race was at the core of America's identity and its most pressing moral challenge. He believed that until the country honestly faced its history of racism and its ongoing impact, it could not truly progress or fulfill its democratic ideals.
We have, as it seems to me, a very curious sense of reality—or, rather, perhaps, I should say, a striking addiction to irreality.
I have no God, no spiritual or mystical calling, but my core beliefs are centered around a concept that comes from both psychology and Buddhism: Suffering comes when we push back against reality, pretending what’s true isn’t.
When we avoid facing what must be confronted to control our emotions, we soon realize that the invisible forces we fear control us.
This is one theme Baldwin wrote about.
“To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it, or use it: and if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free. I take this to be . . . the American situation in relief, the root of our unadmitted sorrow. These particular people are trapped in a history they refused to know but carry within them. The terrors and panic they experience have everything to do with the gap between who they imagine themselves to be and who, deep down, they really are.”
What’s astonishing about Baldwin’s work is that it’s both timely and timeless. His work is in constant engagement with readers, and across all these decades, his thoughts on modern alienation and the uniquely American madness of white supremacy are still painfully relevant.
Most of his work is widely read and primarily well-known. But there are a few hidden gems.
Today I give you two of them.
To read the rest, you must upgrade.
Join How to Live
For people who live in their heads, feel more than they show, and want a language for both.
Already a paying subscriber? Sign In.
What you’ll receive as a subscriber::
- • Every new essay, the moment it’s published
- • Full access to the complete archive—150+ posts and counting
- • Bonus pieces and experiments-in-progress, shared occasionally
- • Invitations to seasonal, in-person gatherings
- • A direct line to me (annual subscribers): personal replies and tailored recommendations
- • 15% off all workshops and live events
Reply