“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.”

It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.”

We have been great inventors but poor students of ourselves: The religions we invented, helpful though they have been to our moral development, split us further into angels and demons destined for heaven or hell; the psychotherapy we invented, helpful though it has been to allaying our inner turmoil, secularized original sin in its pathology model of the psyche, treating us as problems to be solved rather than parts to be harmonized. Both have sold us the alluring illusion that a state of permanent happiness can be attained — in Eden, or across the finish line of our self-improvement project — ultimately denying our fulness of being, denying the oscillation of “beauty and terror” that makes life alive.

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) defies this marketable myth in a stunning passage from Giovanni’s Room (public library) — the semi-autobiographical novel gave us Baldwin’s equally incisive reflection on love, freedom, and the paradox of choice.

When a man he encounters wonders why “nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” the narrator is stopped up short. With an eye to the banality of the question as a fractal of the banality of life — like the banality of evil, like the banality of survival — Baldwin writes:

The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road — and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

Considering the difficulty of reconciling our own darkness with our light, our innocence with our pain, he adds:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. 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. Heroes are rare.

Complement with Walter Lippmann, writing in the wake of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, on what makes a hero and Leonard Cohen, wresting a secular truth from a religious concept, on what makes a saint, then revisit Baldwin on how to live through your darkest hour.