everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light

everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light

I break out into a sweat every time I am inspired or commissioned to work with James Baldwin’s words. 

His beautiful masterfully crafted sentences are never short. If not approached with love I end up feeling like an unskilled butcher. It’s always a challenge to distill a piece that fit with in the bounds of 17 X 23 inches with 2 X 1 inch letters. 

In celebration of his 100th Birthday today pennant was pulled from this passage from “Nothing Personal”

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.” 

In 1964, James Baldwin and Richard Avedon published “Nothing Personal,” their collaborative exploration of American identity. Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and an interconnected an range of questions, from America’s fixation on eternal youth, to its refusal to recognize the past, its addiction to consumerism, and the lovelessness that fuels it in its cities and popular culture. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increasing immediacy. The newest edition includes a new foreword from interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry.