You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
James Baldwin(1924-1987) to Life magazine, 1962.
James Baldwin was a writer and civil rights activist
who is best known for his semi-autobiographical novels
and plays that center on race, politics, and sexuality.
“When I was growing up, I felt different, like most creative people do. I love books, poetry, and baseball in no particular order. And you think you’re alone, you think you’re crazy. I grew up in a household of books, books, newspapers, magazines, radio, a little bit of television, but it was mostly the writing. We took a lot of car trips in the old Ford station wagon when I was young, so I think I identified with Odysseus going on a long, long trip to find something exciting, and then the effort to get home again. Then I found Albert Camus, I found Emily Dickinson, I found Homer, and there is nothing that I have gone through that someone else hasn’t gone through before. Goethe once said, when you find the book you have been looking for, the one that gives meaning to your very existence, it’s like a lost sailor at sea clutching at last to a raft. You never forget those books. This is a way for us to find our way to our true north. We read, absorb, travel, study, but in the end we have to make all this work our own, which means our personal stamp on it reveals our own hurts, our own pains, but then our exaltation as well. It’s a combination.
Phil Cousineau is a freelance writer, filmmaker,
photographer, art and literary tour leader,
teacher of creativity, mythographer, storyteller,
and an all-around Renaissance man.
He’s the author of The Wisdom of the Odyssey:
Twenty-Four Life Lessons from Homer’s Epic
