“Words For A New Year”

In 1962, James Baldwin published in The New York Times Book Review an essay entitled “As Much Truth as One Can Bear.” The article was an extended meditation on the role of a new generation of writers, among whom Baldwin was fast emerging as a leading voice, and the challenges they faced as American artists writing in the shadow of people like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. These writers were and still are sacrosanct and often served as a standard to judge the inadequacy of the younger generation. The past full of giants, Baldwin suggested, was used to bludgeon the present replete with those who fall short.

Now I mention this not to engage in an analysis of Baldwin’s somewhat impious engagement with the American literary canon. Rather, it is what he says about the role of the artist that strikes me as particularly relevant for this last post of 2024. “The effort to become a great novelist,” Baldwin wrote, “involves attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.” We must “deal with what words hide and what they reveal.”

This is all the more important in a country like our own, where our national stories obscure the horrors of what we’ve done and ensure our sense of innocence. Telling the truth here (or what one might describe as bearing witness) especially in dark times like our own, requires a certain kind of courage and commitment to shatter national illusions that offer safety and protect the order of things. Telling the truth involves risking it all in moments like these in order to release us into a new way of being together. This will entail, at times, a withering criticism of the past that haunts and a scathing critique of our self-conception. As Baldwin put it (riffing on Henry David Thoreau),

“we live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up; and therefore, it seems to me, the adulation so cruelly proffered our elders has nothing to do with their achievement…but has to do with our impulse to look back on what we imagine to have been a happier time. It is an adulation which has panic at the root.”

Panic at the root. Baldwin is unsparing in his criticism.

“One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then, to which I have referred comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed. How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so empty and desperate, what are we to do about it?”

A longing for a happier time – a kind of nostalgia – allows us to turn our heads away from the difficulties of our days. We want to make America great again or we pine for the days before Donald Trump. As if America’s loss of innocence is a recent event, or as if the issue is the loss of innocence at all.

As we leave 2024, America must choose whether it will finally become a genuinely multiracial democracy. And this will involve grappling with the past that haunts our present and with those who clamor for the days of old (nostalgia) when people like me supposedly knew their place. A line from T.S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages comes to mind:

That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror

As MAGA prepares to take the reins of government, we must relentlessly tell the truth about this country. About its greed. About its selfishness. About its hatreds. We must describe us to ourselves honestly, without the crutch of myths and illusions. For, as Baldwin wrote, “the trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never…conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation—we will never establish human communities—until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.”

We all have been baptized in the American fantasy of itself as an example of democracy achieved. That fantasy has distorted our moral sense, because it requires that we lie to ourselves about what we have done and what we are doing. And a lie that thrives on a kind of willful ignorance makes this place, and us, monstrous. I believe it is the task of the American writer, of all of us really, to do exactly what Baldwin called for in 1962: “mount an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred.” It is to unmask the panic at the root.

In doing so, we must risk everything in this moment. America is broken. Young people are coming of age amid catastrophes. They know the country is broken. Some reach for progressive politics. Others turn to authoritarianism or fascism. They are reaching for language that can help them make sense of what the American fantasy has hidden and concealed. But Baldwin is right. The search requires a confrontation of sorts.

“Our own record must be read. [T]he air of this time and place is so heavy with rhetoric, so thick with soothing lies, that one must really do great violence to language, one must somehow disrupt the comforting beat, in order to be heard.”

For me, the world as we wish it to be all too often drives our descriptions—our choice of words, our willingness to take rude positions and ask hard questions. For those catching the brunt of this hell, the normative question (who do we take ourselves to be?) is always lurking in the shadows or staring one right in the face. Baldwin wrote that “not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

We cannot stick our heads in the sand in 2025. We cannot tinker around the edges. Of course, we could. In fact, in previous times like these, we have. My use of “cannot” here is really an “ought not” and a hope that we may have learned a lesson or two. We must shake loose from the shibboleths of the past and their gods, turn our backs on the old vision of America (even as we drown in it) and, with words that open up our imaginations, create ourselves anew and become better people.

In 2025, let’s make art that helps us make a new world. Let’s write books that unsettle the sediment. Let’s make music that stirs the soul. Let’s take political positions that aren’t beholden to old ideologies born in 18^th and 19^th century Europe. Let us be more concerned about being decent and loving than being right and seen as virtuous. Let us tell the truth and then a bit more.

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