Writing's Responsibility

Odd the way to finding things in my life. I had heard of Ouida without knowing any details. I clicked on Ada Calhoun on Ouida, The Most Famous Lady Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of just to satisfy my ignorance (which it did and then some - do read the original article) but then I came upon this paragraph:

Hating Shakespeare,” James Baldwin writes, “[The poet’s] responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnamable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people—all people!—who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.”

Our age seems intent on denying humanity - we have seen the evidence and I may have stuck my nose into even more ugliness. But having chosen to live and write, bearing witness fits in with what I told him was my purpose. Not stories, I told him, but eulogies.

sch 6/13/22