James Baldwin’s story Sonny’s Blues is another masterpiece of compression. It is one of the best stories ever written about what it means to be an artist — what it means to be an artist, in particular, in a family that doesn’t quite understand what that means, which I think is the situation for many artists. It’s a story about brothers — the straight brother’s feelings of disapproval, envy, confusion. All those emotions he has towards his brother are almost resolved toward the end, but they’re resolved by being witness to a mystery, which is art. When he watches Sonny playing, he kind-of gets it: what Sonny’s life is about, and why he might be a junkie, and why he went to jail. But he can’t completely get it because that’s not who he is. It’s an epiphany that is the opposite of an epiphany.
