James Baldwin

Earlier this semester I was talking about it. The luxury some authors have to illicitly describe what the characters feel like in the story, the characters themselves, the scene, and what is going on. James Baldwin, uses incredible language while setting up the story and its characters,

“I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. … I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.

It was not to be believed … I was scared, scared for Sonny…. A block of ice got settled on my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my class algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. …

When he was… his face had been wonderfully bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; he’d had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy.”

There’s just a level of intensity in his writing that makes it stand out, even in the first two or three paragraphs. There is just something to be said about an author that can accurately describe the entire set up and premise of the story in the first several paragraphs.

Now maybe I’m crazy but can see and have experienced the difficulty of this task. I like to look at myself as an admirer of the arts; someone who can fully appreciate the passion that an artist puts in to his work. And that probably comes from my parents raising me with the mind set of, “If it doesn’t make you work hard, then it’s not good work.” Just because you can’t do something as well as someone else, doesn’t make it any less of an accomplishment. I love it. Literature is a whole other subject, and it needs to be appreciated.