Book Thoughts: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Over the past few years as I have ventured into reading more magazine pieces, primarily from the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Nation, I have encountered references to James Baldwin. Baldwin, writing from the 1950s through the 1980s when he died, wrote many pieces related to civil rights and the black experience in post-WWII America. At the beginning of this year, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me," which, from understanding some of Coates' other writings in the Atlantic, was connected to Baldwin (and Coates mentions Baldwin frequently in his other writings). All of this is to say that Baldwin has been in my general radar for a few years, and I finally made the plunge to read him with this book.

It did not disappoint. Baldwin's writing is tremendous; it rolls with emotional force and the force grows within each sentence. Whether its expressing anger or outrage or fatigue or frustration, many of Baldwin's sentences and paragraphs in this book leaves the reader feeling like he just got on an emotional rollercoaster due to its intensity. The books itself is the collection of two essays (one of which serves as the primary inspiration or model for Coates' "Between the World and Me"), and discusses Coates early life in Harlem and the disconnect for Black Americans serving in WWII and coming home to a segregated country. Throughout, Baldwin touches on religion, discussing without reservation or fear of critique Christianity and the appeal to many (though not him) of the Nation of Islam movement in the 1960s.

Baldwin's searing, direct language forces a reader to confront certain stark realities - from racism and white supremacy, to religion, existentialism, and the importance of a cultural identity to individual identity. Often, when reading, I kept thinking that of the phrase, Baldwin is bringing the heat to a particular topic. Some examples below...

Religion - "If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."

Civil Resistance - "The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

Life, meaning - "Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us."

I cannot convey, for me, how much meaning and truth is contained in the phase "confronting with passion the conundrum of life." So much to unpack in such a little phrase.

But most of this work by Baldwin is this way. It isn't long, and doesn't take long to read as the language rolls with passion and fury, making it compulsive reading. But it is a book that gives its reader much, very much, to unpack and digest. And those are the best of books.

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