Founders, Builders, Heroes

On the courage required to face our problems and the strength needed to overcome them.

There’s a passage in Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin that I think about all the time. The novel’s central character, David, is comparing the loss of childhood with the departure from Eden, our collective – and yet simultaneously deeply individual – expulsion from that land of innocence. Cast out into the wilderness of adulthood, “life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it”.

“People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.”

When I read this passage now, I can’t help but see these two kinds of madman fighting the culture wars. There are those who eternally remember, desperate to live in pleasant memories rather than face the modern world. Then there are those who perpetually forget, who refuse to recall th…