“If one is trying to become an individual in that most individual of countries, America, one’s really up against something,” he said. To try to think for oneself, and act for oneself, and have as little regard as I was forced to have for the architecture of my prison…to go into battle with all of that is to be very lonely. It’s a sort of exile, and if you’re lonely enough, you can perish from being lonely. It is a wonderful concept Baldwin sketches here, the loneliness inherent in the process required to create oneself apart from the assumptions of who one is supposed to be in America. This
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