‘Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden’, Jacques said. And
then: ‘I wonder why.’
...
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 perpetually recurring death of their
innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of 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
On one side, it is delightful to see a writer put your thoughts into words, exactly. On the other, it feels bad too. Does it not? I mean, it
hurts to see your pain banalized. The voice of all those tears, quietly living
in a library corner, in crisp old golden pages of an obscure book no one cared
to hold.
The sound of those pages, as they are flipped through,
calm the murmurs of restless dreams, with a song like the waves and scent
like their mist, clouding senses, enveloping my environment, just singing,
lulling and luring... ‘To where?’, I wonder. ‘To home’, they answer. Need I tell you that I follow? Always.
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