Thank you for this. Bringing in Tillich adds weight, explaining why certain forms of “innocence” remain so durable: one involves risk; the other, safety—echoing in political life: staying quiet can be mistaken for moral clarity, and doing the expected passes for doing what’s right.
You bring to mind Graham Greene. Using the language of his day: “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” —The Quiet American.
Thank you, William! Overripe innocence is a tough thing to detect in oneself--at least it was for me. Tillich and Baldwin have given me good tools. In a couple of his essays, Baldwin associates innocence with an aversion to experience. I think Greene's picture of someone "wandering the world, meaning no harm" may capture such an aversion. Our countrymen are famous for wandering the world, but they rarely break away from the tour buses (the external authorities). What do they really experience?
About “innocence”: Perhaps this, also from Baldwin, has a place in your beautifully developing thought. (I came upon this years ago and have never quit thinking about it, particularly because there are so many different ways to think about it--at first it sounded so cryptic.)
“Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.“—James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room - Part One, Chapter 2.
The rare hero is capable of simultaneously remembering their innocence while also forgetting it and therefore living their lives as their true selves.
Thank you for that passage! I remember the flaming sword but probably skimmed over the rest of this rich text in favor of returning to the dialogue.
I wonder if each form of madness is, among other things, one of the two extreme ways we deal with shame today. In one extreme, we "shame" someone (or "shame" ourselves); that is, we permanently stigmatize a person and effectively dismiss them from the community. In the other extreme, we lose our sense of shame, or rather we renounce it. Native American life generally involved a healthy sense of community shame that invited an offending party into a redemptive process. Perhaps this redemptive life (and the lack of such redemption in Western civilization) is a good part of what caused Rousseau and later the Romantics to understand indigenous peoples as being enviably innocent: it was the only way they could understand them.
A beautiful and provocative response. Yes—each form of madness might reflect our broken relationship to shame: one denies it, the other weaponizes it. Redemption, as you note, becomes the missing middle. Baldwin’s hero, then, isn’t just rare but redemptive—holding pain without being undone by it.
I was looking for the "perfection" post and came here instead, so I re-read it and appreciated much of what you say here. The Tillich quotes are especially good. I understand and have been in the position of being unaccepted by others when I stopped playing a particular role they had come to expect.
We all need to figure out where the "authority" for our lives needs to come from - what is authentic, what is truly ourselves and the living out of who we are meant to be? It can be very complicated when one is in longterm relationships with expectations, manipulations, and guilt -- as well as love, which makes us not want to disappoint the others who we care for deeply.
Thank you, Beth. It was a tough year for everyone involved. You nailed it: "longterm relationships with expectations, manipulations, and guilt -- as well as love." I'm so glad I went through it, of course.
Thank you for this. Bringing in Tillich adds weight, explaining why certain forms of “innocence” remain so durable: one involves risk; the other, safety—echoing in political life: staying quiet can be mistaken for moral clarity, and doing the expected passes for doing what’s right.
You bring to mind Graham Greene. Using the language of his day: “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” —The Quiet American.
Thank you, William! Overripe innocence is a tough thing to detect in oneself--at least it was for me. Tillich and Baldwin have given me good tools. In a couple of his essays, Baldwin associates innocence with an aversion to experience. I think Greene's picture of someone "wandering the world, meaning no harm" may capture such an aversion. Our countrymen are famous for wandering the world, but they rarely break away from the tour buses (the external authorities). What do they really experience?
About “innocence”: Perhaps this, also from Baldwin, has a place in your beautifully developing thought. (I came upon this years ago and have never quit thinking about it, particularly because there are so many different ways to think about it--at first it sounded so cryptic.)
“Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.“—James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room - Part One, Chapter 2.
The rare hero is capable of simultaneously remembering their innocence while also forgetting it and therefore living their lives as their true selves.
Thank you for that passage! I remember the flaming sword but probably skimmed over the rest of this rich text in favor of returning to the dialogue.
I wonder if each form of madness is, among other things, one of the two extreme ways we deal with shame today. In one extreme, we "shame" someone (or "shame" ourselves); that is, we permanently stigmatize a person and effectively dismiss them from the community. In the other extreme, we lose our sense of shame, or rather we renounce it. Native American life generally involved a healthy sense of community shame that invited an offending party into a redemptive process. Perhaps this redemptive life (and the lack of such redemption in Western civilization) is a good part of what caused Rousseau and later the Romantics to understand indigenous peoples as being enviably innocent: it was the only way they could understand them.
A beautiful and provocative response. Yes—each form of madness might reflect our broken relationship to shame: one denies it, the other weaponizes it. Redemption, as you note, becomes the missing middle. Baldwin’s hero, then, isn’t just rare but redemptive—holding pain without being undone by it.
". . . holding pain without being undone by it." Yes. Pharaoh's cupbearer as hero: "I must call my faults to mind today!" (Gen. 41:9, Everett Fox tr.)
! ! !
I was looking for the "perfection" post and came here instead, so I re-read it and appreciated much of what you say here. The Tillich quotes are especially good. I understand and have been in the position of being unaccepted by others when I stopped playing a particular role they had come to expect.
We all need to figure out where the "authority" for our lives needs to come from - what is authentic, what is truly ourselves and the living out of who we are meant to be? It can be very complicated when one is in longterm relationships with expectations, manipulations, and guilt -- as well as love, which makes us not want to disappoint the others who we care for deeply.
Thank you, Beth. It was a tough year for everyone involved. You nailed it: "longterm relationships with expectations, manipulations, and guilt -- as well as love." I'm so glad I went through it, of course.