The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love – whether we call it friendship or family or romance – is a function of mirroring and amplifying each other's light. Gentle work. Hard work. A life-saving work in those times when life and shame and sorrow block our light from our perspective, but there is still a loving person with clear eyes to shine it on. In our best moments, we are that person to another.
In re-reading this – as we must read all great and obvious truths, over and over again – I was reminded of the passage. James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) since Nothing Personal (public library) – his 1964 collaboration with photographer Richard Avedon, a high school classmate and lifelong friend, containing some of Baldwin's lesser-known but most intimate writings, including his antidote to dog-hour despair and his power of entropy. (In the years since I started writing about this forgotten treasure, it was unforgettable in the new edition of Penguin Random House – sadly, without Avedon's photos, ending the spirit of cooperation between the friends who created this project in the first place; redeemingly, with a foreword by the magnificent Imani Perry, who writes in person “for her lasting gift of reminding us how reading “allows us to know each other” and “makes everything seem possible.”)
At the end of the book's four essays, Baldwin writes:
One finds light in darkness, that is what darkness means; but everything in our lives depends on how we carry the light. It is necessary, while it is dark, to know that there is light somewhere, to know that in him, waiting to be found, there is light.
This light, Baldwin intimates, is often and easily found in love – that great and inexorable gift of fortune.
Love becomes a lens on the world, space and time – a hole through which new light shines through to reflect on the cave wall of the places we realize are most important in places we would never know otherwise.
You write:
Pretend you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, where only your name is on the map; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called an accident, connects you with a man or woman living in Hong Kong; and that you fell in love. Hong Kong will soon cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may not know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.
What a journey life is! It depends, entirely, on things that cannot be seen. If your loved one lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, you will have to go to Hong Kong. Maybe you'll spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And I assure you, as long as space and time separate you from anyone you love, you have found out a lot about shipping lines, airlines, earthquakes, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, because you love the person who lives there. And love will have no choice but to enter into a war with space and time and, moreover, win.
A master of metaphor – holding the door to new worlds – Baldwin takes the story of what we call long-distance love and finds in it the theme of all love.
Every love covers a vast space in the midst of loneliness, it becomes a telescope that zooms in on other lives and, as a result, magnifies the value of the whole world.
All love is a war of light against the entropy that is always compressing space-time into nothingness, against the harsh reality that you will die, and I will die, and everyone we love will die, and what will survive us is the shoreless seed and the star.
