The Wretched of the Earth

Burning Bodies (2018) by Wael Darweish. Photo by Andrea Rude McKenzie

I don’t like to start my day off with the dreadful news. I feel fresh and enlivened in the mornings and refuse to taint this short-lived joy with the hideous happenings “out there.”

Instead, I turn to the artists, poets, and philosophers—the true awakeners of the human spirit.

Black coffee, old books, and the music of Gustav Mahler — the breakfast of champs.

Today, as the world continues to trudge along on its ruinous path, I’m reading the essays of one of the most eloquent and profound writers of the 20th century, James Baldwin.

He once reminded us: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

The New York Times once labeled Baldwin "the best essayist in this country—a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country."

Below is a highly perceptive passage from Baldwin’s book of essays, The Devil Finds Work. Unfortunately, his impassioned words seem all too relevant today. I hope it hits you like it did me.

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Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have.