You've GOT to Read This Book
In December, we took a few weeks vacation from our vacation. We spent some time with family and friends in the Chicago area. As usual, we made our way to the local library and stockpiled books for our visit. Among stacks of language learning books, I also grabbed a few gigantic volumes of short story collections. Among them was a collection entitled "You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe". Over the course of three weeks, I paged through the anthologies and collections, picking and choosing stories to read. The story that stood out the most among all of them was James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues. I've read Baldwin's work before but this was my first time reading Sonny's Blues and as I turned the last page I felt regret for never knowing it before. The final pages pulled me into a room of music from which, now that I've witnessed it, I will never leave.
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”