Their reaction, when it is suggested that they can or that they must, is panic… And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing human damage. They do not know how they will live without those traditions that have given them their identity. And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive. I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better.
It is for this reason that all societies have battled with the incorrigible disturber of the peace - the artist. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The state of birth, suffering, love, and death are extreme states - extreme, universal, and inescapable. I put the matter this way, not out of any desire to create pity for the artist - God forbid! - but to suggest how nearly, after all, is his state the state of everyone, and in an attempt to make vivid his endeavor. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control. It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing beside some silver lake. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.īut unlike David Foster Wallace’s heartbreaking and rather matter-of-fact observation - “I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.” - Baldwin is careful to point out that this ideal aloneness is not a state of nihilistic resignation but a prerequisite for realizing and inhabiting one’s true identity, rather than donning an identity inherited from society like a traditional costume: He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty.
There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality - a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed. Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. In a 1962 essay titled “The Creative Process,” found in the altogether fantastic anthology The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction ( public library), Baldwin lays out a manifesto of sorts, nuanced and dimensional yet exploding with clarity of conviction, for the trying but vital responsibility that artists, “a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead,” have to their society.īaldwin, only thirty-eight at the time, writes: “The sole purpose of human existence,” Carl Jung wrote in his reflections of life and death in 1957, “is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” Five years later, in one of his least well-known but most enchanting works, the great novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and cultural critic James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) argued for this existential kindling of light as the sole purpose of the artist’s life.