Tues Paris Reading Rec: "Equal in Paris," James Baldwin

James Baldwin's wide-ranging essay collection NOTES OF A NATIVE SON is not specifically a Paris book -- not, anyway, in the sense that his novel GIOVANNI'S ROOM is. And given that the novel even has a scene in a bookshop, it's all the more relevant to my year-long #parisbythebook project -- but that's for another day).

But "Equal in Paris," which has few equals as an essay, is the urgent read this week. In truth, Baldwin is always an urgent read. In his essays in particular, his prose is so surefooted, so sharp, it's literally breathtaking for me -- as in, when I reach a paragraph like this*, and its devastating final sentence, it's a moment or two before I remember: breathe. And when I do, I remember what Baldwin's still telling us, decades on: we have an awful lot of work still to do.

*[As context: Baldwin has been arrested and put on trial because an acquaintance stole a hotel bedsheet, or drap de lit. Better context, just read the original essay.] "The story of the drap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were 'great.' I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled."