September 12, 2010

NOT AN INTELLECTUAL

Baldwin, James, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon, 2010) (From 'What's the Reason Why?: A Symposium by Best-Selling Authors: Baldwin on Another Country': "I am not an intellectual, not in the dreary sense that word is used today, and do not want to be: I am aiming at what Henry James called 'perception at the pitch of passion'." Id. at 39, 40. Also see James Campbell, "Sorrow Wears and Uses Us," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/12/2010.).