The light will rise for others, but not for you. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. It is a fearful speculation - or, rather, a fearful knowledge - that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. He writes:įour AM can be a devastating hour. Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits - of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age- and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope - are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”Īt no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon - an old high school friend of his - to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book Nothing Personal ( public library). The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit - James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) - explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.

But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease - for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. “Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future.

Little man james baldwin