Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are. James Baldwin
You must understand that your pain is trivial. You must connect to unify with others and base your connections on struggles. Baldwin is saying that we can unify through pain and hardship because everyone goes through pain and suffering. By looking at how we hurt and pain. He is telling us to look at the basic internal conflicts and basic human struggles and help each other hurt a little less.
He also talks about how there people who live there days in darkness, and the artist job is lighten up those people’s lives. This declaration connects well with what De Toqueville and Whitman has discussed in the first readings about the artist and literatures importance in a democratic society. I thoroughly enjoy listening to Baldwin and reading his literature because of how he articulates the true essence of living in America. He tackles the issue of unification by trying to turn a suffering into a positive. Throughout many of Baldwin’s work that I have read such as, ” The Fire Next Time” I have noticed that he maintains a spirit of optimism even through the struggle and inequality. However if you are talking about Baldwin to someone who may not be able to extract the same information out, you can turn to a 2016 author, Ta- Nehisi Coates who wrote “Between the World and Me”.
While reading Ta- Nehisi Coates who draws inspirations from Baldwin’s the Fire next time, it is crucial to consider how they both address the theme of safety when regards to being Black in America, the theme of bodies and protecting your body is something that unless you are conscious of you never really think of. Coates states.
“I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful.” pg 71
Perspectives of a Democracy 