Arnon Grunberg

School

Medium

A friend wrote me: "Thought you'd like this one":

'When I imagine the happy medium between representation and good art, I am reminded of my favorite author, James Baldwin, who once put it this way:

“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 the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I think of these words and am at once transported back into my high school literature class. I read Hayden’s verse, and at once I recognize myself — not in the poet but in the poem. Beyond my blackness, he sees me clearly for who I am. In this moment I am connected to him and all those ever engrossed in the “austere and lonely offices of love.”'

Read the article by Bianca Vivion-Brooks in NYT here.

Intimacy is seeing (and acknowledging) other people's torment up-close.

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