It's what you see in your mirror. What you try to do is isolate whatever it is you see in that other person, which is you. Everybody knows, for example, if you listen, every writer knows, you listen to me or I listen to you, no matter what I'm saying.
may be describing, I'm describing myself. There's a prejudice that at one time was against homosexuals. At one time? Yeah, hold on. When it was a criminal offense, even.
Then that got removed. The law. And people started to appear to accept.
Back, it comes again now because of AIDS. It never went anywhere. It never went anywhere.
People's attitudes don't change because the law changes. I know that. And the homosexual question is like what we call the racial question.
Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. You don't know where it will carry you.
And it is a terrifying thing, love. It is the only human possibility, but it's terrifying. And a man can fall in love with a man, a woman can fall in love with a man. can fall in love with a woman, there's nothing anybody can do about it. It's not in the province of the law. It's something you do with the church.
And if you lie about that, if you lie about that, you lie about everything. And no one has a right to try to tell another human being whom he or she can or should love. But when you wrote Giovanni's Room a long time ago, that was quite a brave book to bring out, wasn't it? It was about love, but it wasn't about homosexual love, but it was about love.
But you deliberately put in homosexual love, presumably. Well, the boy's in the middle. It's not so much about homosexual love. sexuality at all.
It's about what happens to you if you can't love anybody. It doesn't make any difference whether you can't love a woman, you can't love a man, you can't love anybody. You're dangerous because you have no way of learning humility. You have no way of learning that other people suffer.
You have no way of learning how to use your suffering and theirs to get from one place to another. In short, you fail to even responsibility, which is to love each other. Are you still in despair about the world? I know that I've been in despair about the world.
I'm enraged. Enraged, alright. But I don't think I'm in despair.
I can't afford despair. I can't tell my nephew, my niece. You can't tell the children. There's no hope.
I suppose I'm wondering whether we're more materialistic, more selfish. I don't know more. I think that we're more panic-stricken.
I think that I walk through these cities, the cities of the Western world, London, New York, and sometimes it resembles the most poverty-stricken cities of the East. There's been a breakdown, a betrayal of the social contract. In Western life, and people are grabbing for things and holding on to what they think they can get and stepping all over their neighbours because they are panic-stricken. What, comforting themselves with material things? Yes, because...
Yes, when people do that, they are reacting to a... Something is beginning to crack. People hoard all this because they don't have anything else, but they don't really believe in it.
And they kill to get it. But that proves the moral bankruptcy, which translates itself into the actual bankruptcy of the world in which we live. We have yet to understand that if I am starving, you are in danger. People think that my danger makes them safe. They're in trouble.
It is clear to me, it's clear to many, that what we call the political vocabulary of this age cannot serve the needs of this age. That we will have to find a way to get beyond our crippling habits. This is not...
the 19th century. I mean, Victoria is long, long dead, and Europe is no longer the center of the world. Well, thank you for being the center of my world for a while today, James Baldwin. Thank you very much. James Baldwin, who died on Monday.
We showed that program again instead of our billed interview with Sir Alec Guinness, which you will be able to see next Wednesday. I'll be back on Friday. In the meantime, good afternoon.