November 9, 2025

make freedom real

tea and clarity

Drinking tea in a London hotel room; the tea is good and the hangers are removable and there are two good chairs for reading in. In London, where the BBC is in crisis over Trump, somehow.

In lieu of connecting to the (flaky, expensive) in-flight wifi I worked my way through my digital to-be-read pile, including Worlds of Exile and Illusion.

Last week I saw Seat of Our Pants at the Public (a wild ride) and By Heart by Tiago Rodrigues (I suspect I will always be thinking about this, now that I have experienced it).

Reminding myself that art helps me be able to see reality ever more clearly.

Attribution

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

— from The Creative Process by James Baldwin in Creative America (1962)