"I have a rendezvous with life"
About this Quote
A “rendezvous” isn’t a duty or a destiny; it’s an appointment you choose to keep. Countee Cullen’s line tilts life away from abstraction and toward encounter: intimate, time-bound, slightly romantic, and quietly defiant. The phrasing suggests someone who has been told, in a thousand ways, that the world may not be waiting for him, and answers back with a crisp promise: I will show up anyway.
Cullen, writing in the orbit of the Harlem Renaissance, understood that “life” wasn’t evenly distributed. For Black artists in early-20th-century America, claiming a full, vivid existence was never just personal aspiration; it was cultural argument. “Rendezvous” carries the thrill of anticipation, but also the pressure of a clock. There’s urgency here, the sense that postponement is a luxury, that joy and self-fashioning must be seized against forces that specialize in delay: segregation, poverty, the narrowing scripts of what Black art should be.
The subtext is not naive optimism. It’s a posture of readiness. To say you have a rendezvous implies obstacles between you and the meeting point, and it implies agency in crossing them. It also slyly reframes mortality: life is not an endless stretch but a finite engagement, one you can enter with intention rather than drift through under someone else’s terms.
The line works because it sounds simple while carrying a whole ethic of presence. It’s a vow to meet experience head-on, and to treat living itself as the main event.
Cullen, writing in the orbit of the Harlem Renaissance, understood that “life” wasn’t evenly distributed. For Black artists in early-20th-century America, claiming a full, vivid existence was never just personal aspiration; it was cultural argument. “Rendezvous” carries the thrill of anticipation, but also the pressure of a clock. There’s urgency here, the sense that postponement is a luxury, that joy and self-fashioning must be seized against forces that specialize in delay: segregation, poverty, the narrowing scripts of what Black art should be.
The subtext is not naive optimism. It’s a posture of readiness. To say you have a rendezvous implies obstacles between you and the meeting point, and it implies agency in crossing them. It also slyly reframes mortality: life is not an endless stretch but a finite engagement, one you can enter with intention rather than drift through under someone else’s terms.
The line works because it sounds simple while carrying a whole ethic of presence. It’s a vow to meet experience head-on, and to treat living itself as the main event.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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