James Baldwin, in Meeting the Man (1970, dir. by Terence Dixon)
There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some. There’s more than one would think. In any case, if you break faith with what you know that’s a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that’s enough. Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together, really it is, held together by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.
Thomas Merton, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. … This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
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