Another Country

by James Baldwin

Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Tu me fais toujours confiance, j’espère?’

a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms – while still leaving them standing mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills.

And they were equal in that both were afraid of what unanswerable and unimaginable riddles might be uncovered in so merciless a light.

How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?’