It is a stranger, a stranger with whom one is forced to deal day in and day out. The ? fact forever for everybody is something else. We’ve agreed ? certain kind of involvement in the world and this is what he does and this is who he is. But the crucial element that one can consider here is that element of a life that we consider to be an identity, the way in which one puts oneself together, the way one imagines oneself to be, the reality, for example, the invented reality, standing before you now, arbitrarily called Jimmy Baldwin, who retains a great many other things. I suppose the first thing I have to suggest is that one considers the fact that in the life of a man, the life of a woman, in everybody’s life, there are several elements always at work. Now there are several thousand things that one must think out of the context in which we are speaking. At some point the man says: “I stand before my highest mountain and before my longest journey and therefore must I descend deeper than ever before I have descended.” And this comes from Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathrustra I think. I have one more quotation that I want to give you.
I want you somehow to make a certain leap with me.
Lecture by James Baldwin, April 1963 (see video )
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