candescence

In reference to Coates’s “fatalism,” McCarthy writes: “Like all those who have taken up the pen to strike at America’s racial injustice, he is also the inheritor of a proud tradition that has relentlessly and defiantly believed that we have it in our means to break the spell of oppression, and that speaking truth to power is not an act of despair, but one of candescence.”

Candescence, kan-des′ens, n. a white heat.—adj.

Now this approximation to commonplace is the great horror of shallow writers; and the way to avoid it appears to be this:—Proclaim your thought at once, in all its crude candescence, before it has had time to cool and shape itself; then, in order to save your credit with the more captions and scrutinizing, give, at some convenient interval, such an explanation or modification as will show that, after all, you were as wise as your reader.

The solid masses which are observed by night to fall to the earth from fire-balls, and by day generally when the sky is clear, from a cark small cloud, are accompanied by much candescence.