Another Country

by James Baldwin

I thought he was a pretty self-centered character, if you want the truth.” “Oh, Well,” she said, “self-centered—! We don’t know a soul who isn’t.” “You’re not,” he said. “You think of other people and you try to treat them right. You spend your life trying to take care of the children—and me—” “Oh, but you are my life—you and the children. What would I do, what would I be, without you? I’m just as self-centered as anybody else. Can’t you see that?”

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.

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.

The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

How could Eric have known that his fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice, and lived in his eyes with all the brilliance and beauty and terror of desire?

For shame had not so much abated as found a partner. Affection had appeared, but through a fissure, a crevice, in the person, through which, behind affection, came all the winds of fear. For the act of love is a confession. One lies about the body but the body does not lie about itself; it cannot lie about the force which drives it.

He knew that he had a life to make, but he did not seem to have the tools.

Love is expensive, Yves had once said, with his curiously dry wonder. One must put furniture around it, or it goes. Now, for a while, there would be no furniture—how long would this night have to last them?

Love was a country he knew nothing about.

“Laugh, clown,” she said.