The Power of a Faith

Baldwin, who was deeply disturbed by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, still gives a glowing description of its effects on its converts-

"Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what a generation of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light."

Patientia vinco

"Patientia vinco"

By patience I conquer.

I am by nature impatient and flighty.  Like Laman and Lemuel, it is not that I do not ever repent and do well, it is that I do not persist in my efforts.  This proverb is a reminder to me of how all things, both temporal and spiritual, are made permanent in the human soul.

Havel on Western Politics

An interesting look at ourselves from the outside.

"It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it.  People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.  But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion;  the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information; all of it...can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity's rediscovery of itself."

The Power of the Powerless

Baldwin - Sensuality, Self, and the Fountain of Life

"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....Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.  It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult.  The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself.  Such a person interposes between himself  and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, thought eh person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!) are historical and political attitudes.  They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person."

Baldwin - the culture of Harlem and community

In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare.  Perhaps we were, all of us - pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children - bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.  I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about "the man."  We had the liquor, the chicken, the music and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not.  This is the freedom one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz.

The Fire Next Time

The Sense of Self

"I had another experience at about this time [my twelfth year].  I was taking the long road to school from Klein-Huningen, where we lived, to Basel, when suddenly for a single moment I had the overwhelming impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud.  I knew all at once: now I am myself!  It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an "I."  But at this moment I came upon myself.  Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me.  Now I happened to myself.  Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist.  Previously I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed.  This experience seemed to me tremendously important and new: there was "authority" in me."

Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Walcott on Focus

Measure the days you have left.  Do just that labor
which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbor

and a sail coming in.

Derek Walcott
Omeros