it was in rajoy at school that i encountered him and i began teaching at my first job in bowdoin and fell in love with him ever since. host: can you elaborate? guest: i wasn't mature enough to read baldwin. baldwin believes in the socratic victim. in order to say anything about the country, about the world, you have to engage your own -- engage the messiness of your own interior life. this is what i might -- what i meant by my own interior wounds and vulnerability. i wasn't mature enough to read him, and then in graduate school, i was reading in the privacy of my own study, in seminars at princeton, i would read him with my wife and suddenly i would have to encounter blushed faces, red guilt, this kind of ridden glance. he made people uncomfortable, because he spoke such unvarnished truth. i was uncomfortable having to manage that. i would -- at that time, i was taken with ralph ellison and the mask as their road, fit perfectly. he was more comfortable and philosophically distant and objective. i didn't have to deal with my own mess. i tended to gravitate toward ellison but baldwin w