Re/reading James Baldwin’s Another Country, which is enough to make one’s hair stand on end. Throughout, one encounters passages like this one:
He stared into the streets and thought–bitterly, but also with a chilling, stunned sobriety–that he had been seeing them for so long, perhaps he had never known them at all. The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is one has lived through. Most people had not lived–nor, for that matter, could it be said that they had died–through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.
Just typing that makes me feel about six inches taller. It has all the intensity–and none of the fastidiousness–of the best Henry James.