“An artist,” James Baldwin told the interviewer in his historic 1963 LIFE profile, “is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”
https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/11/01/the-gospel-of-james-baldwin-meshell-ndegeocello/?mc_cid=7f8ef83e78&mc_eid=bbeb038de6