What a journey this life is! dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one’s own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light.
“What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost sixty years ago; I’m not gonna live another sixty years. You always told me it takes time; it’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want, for your ‘progress’?” - James Baldwin, 1989. (credit to @_lionheart83 for the inspiration). #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #haveprideinhistory #blacklivesmatter #altonsterling #nightnight
[id: “where, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” /end id]
To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
from James Baldwin, the fire next time, courtesy of @nedlittle
This is the closest I’ll ever come to filling the “Like a bad pun,” square of my @theterrorbingo card, and it’s technically only like, a week late, so I’m doing it—time is fake anyway, you know.
