James Baldwin

Sonny's Blues

giuli

I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. 

He had made it his: thạt long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. 

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. 

Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. 

He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do whạt he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires. and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try to try and make it do everything. 

He wanted Sonny to leave the shore line and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and đrowning were not the same thing — he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. 

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. 

[…], his teeth gleaming lke a lighthouse and his laugh coming up out of him like the beginning of an earthquake. 

"All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart."

and it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was 

[…] I have to be quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me seems a mortal wound.

His face relaxed a little. But the worry, the thoughtfulness, played on it still, the way shadows play on a face which is staring into the fire.

"No, I don't know that" said Sonny, surprising me. "I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?'"

But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already  ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. […] And when the light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness.

[…] what we both were seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It's always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.

fictions of music and musicians are just so dear to me. the portrayal of music’s power and importance over someone’s life is so dear to me. 

fictions of music and musicians are just so dear to me. the portrayal of music’s power and importance over someone’s life is so dear to me. god this was intense. i love music!!!!!

Sonny's Blues

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