The C.L.R. James Institute: Text: "The Crisis and the Trimuph"

The C.L.R. James Institute

THE CRISIS AND THE TRIUMPH
(Text by C.L.R. James, 1953)

"Every American citizen,
ignorant of so many things
that his European counterpart knows,
is conscious of himself as a distinct personality,
in his own opinion and the opinion of his fellows,
as entitled to special consideration
of his ideas, his feelings, his likes and dislikes
as the most aristocratic heroine of a European novel.
And at the same time he is consumed by the need
of intimate communion with his fellows.
This is the crisis of the modern world
and because of the material conditions
and the history of the United States
that crisis is here, in every personality,
in every social institution, permeating
every aspect and every phase of life.
I watch it every hour of the day,
I have spent countless hours studying
American history and American literature,
relating the present to the past,
estimating the American future.
I am profoundly conscious of the deficiencies
of American civilization.
But they are as nothing to the fact
that America is unburdened
by the weight of the past
which hangs so heavily on Europe,
that as a result there is here not culture
but a need for human relations of a size and scope
which will in the end triumph over all deficiencies."

This quote from Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover: Dartmouth College / University Press of New England, 2001; p. 160) was typeset as a poem by Jim Murray and used as the back cover of the pamphlet C.L.R. James and The Struggle for Happiness.

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Uploaded 31 March 2001
Revised 21 October 2002