On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

Were they still objects of desire instead of – as Howard might put it – desiring subjects?

Womanish, as they said back then, not feminine.

He continued to examine the windblown surface of the small lake in the park opposite. It swelled and surged like a bath two fat men were getting into over and over, one at each end.

He just did not believe, as his father did, that time is how you spend your love.

because I think when people suffer a loss, well, the temptation is for folk to stay away – and I know when my own mother died, everybody stayed away and I felt most resentful of that, and bottom line, I felt, you know, abandoned, and so I just wanted to come by and see how you and the kids were doing, bring some pie and … I mean, I know we’ve had our differences, as families, but when something like this happens I just really feel …’

It was the Staalmeesters’ job to monitor cloth production in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.