Nothing Personal: An Essay

by James Baldwin

handbills were being issued accusing the late President Kennedy of treason, one would need a leftist lunatic with a gun to blow off the President’s head. Leftists have a hard time in the south; there cannot be very many there; I, certainly, was never followed around southern streets by leftist lunatics, but state troopers.

But, if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.

The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.

we are simply being nostalgic concerning the happy, simple, God-fearing life which we imagine ourselves once to have lived.

And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.

Moreover, a day is coming which one will not recall, that last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become

as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.

one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world.

The light will rise for others, but not for you.

Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it—life—one more time?

I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.

All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality—oneself—which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again.

nothing is more vivid in American life than the fact that we have no respect for our children,

nor have our children any respect for us. By being what we have become, by placing things above people, we broke their hearts early, and drove them away.

And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

In the end, the power of love, of loving someone and of being loved, equips us to endure the world as it is and to imagine the world as it could be. Even the emptiness of America can be overcome, Baldwin maintained.