Analytic Note #2

Here's Baldwin saying what I've been trying to say about "luckiness" but saying it with so much more clarity and beauty.

Were it a possibility, I would like to take a bath in James Baldwin's writing.

And for a moment we are silent, alone in our room, which we have shared so long.  The slight rise and fall of Harriet's breathing creates an intermittent pressure against my chest, and I think how, if I had never left America, I would never have met her and would never have established a life of my own, would never have entered my own life.  For everyone's life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop.  And yet everyone's life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken many lives.  If Harriet had been born in America, it would have taken her a long time, perhaps forever to look on me as a man like other men; if I had met her in America, I would never have been able to look on her as a woman like all other women.  The habits of public rage and power would have also been our private compulsions, and would have blinded our eyes.  We would never have been able to love each other.  And Paul would never have been born. 

Perhaps if I had stayed in America, I would have found another woman and had another son.  But that other woman, that other son are in the limbo of vanished possibilities.  I might also have become something else, instead of an actor-singer, perhaps a lawyer, like my brother, or a teacher, like my sister.  But no, I am what I have become and this woman beside me is my wife, and I love her.  All the sons I might have had mean nothing, since I have a son, I named him, Paul, for my father, and I love him.