In America Baldwin was free only in battle, never free to rest

Evidence

My desire to be seduced, charmed, was a hope poisoned by despair: for better or for worse, it simply was not in me to make a separate peace. It was a symptom of how bitterly weary I was of wandering, how I hoped to find a resting place, reconciliation, in the land where I was born. But everything that might have charmed me merely reminded me of how many were excluded, how many were suffering and groaning and dying, not far from paradise which was itself but another circle of hell. Everything that charmed me reminded me of someplace else, someplace where I could walk and talk, someplace where I was freer than I was at home, someplace where I could live without the stifling mask—made me homesick for a liberty I had never tasted here, and without which I could never live or work. In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 401

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core rendering of ‘the after times’ exhaustion — the chronicle of reading the value gap into every facet of the landscape. Essential primary text for the reader’s argument.
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest — and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.’ This condenses the whole tragedy of permanent struggle against the lie into one sentence.