the time is always now.
I knew this week I’d invoke Baldwin; I didn’t know, as I was thinking about which of his lyrical sentences I’d start with, that the one I would keep going back to was also the one that took up residence in my brain four years ago.
As I wrote then:
James Baldwin died long before I could read, and decades before I’d find his work and be permanently changed by the encounter.
And:
Finding your voice is one thing. Using it is another.
To paraphrase Veronica Chambers, my life has long been “lit up by the words of the man Lorraine Hansberry called Jimmy.”
Baldwin, born a hundred years ago, dead now nearly forty, who asked, “How much time do you want, for your progress?”
Baldwin, who said: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
Baldwin, who dared.
Attribution
“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.” — James Baldwin in Faulkner and Desgregation